Guerrilla Translation (GT) began its life as an activist translation collective of politicised, conscious translators. Our motivation is to create a plurilingual knowledge commons, accessible through GT’s websites (English and Spanish so far). But GT is also a translation/language agency offering a variety of communication services and its governance model ties these two facets together.

GT’s model is an extensive overhaul of an orphaned open source governance protocol [1], which we have been substantially overhauled to better fit our needs. The adapted model explicitly incorporates the key practices of Open Cooperativism (a method combining the ideas of the Commons and Free Culture with the social tradition of the cooperative movement), Contributive Accounting (a form of accounting where contributions to a shared project are logged to ensure fair distributions of income and livelihoods) and, uniquely in this space, feminist economics and care work as essential elements [2].

The full model can be read in the link above, but this article takes a narrative approach to answer two very simple questions: what is the model’s logic, and how does it work?

The best way to understand it may seem counterintuitive at first. If Guerrilla Translation is a co-op, think of the co-op members as shareholders. Okay, like in an evil corporation, but bear with us. Each member is an owner, holding different types of shares in the collective. These correspond to tracked “pro bono” (commons-oriented voluntary work chosen by the translators) and “livelihood” (paid) work, as well as reproductive or care work. Shares in these three types of work determine how much is paid on a monthly basis. Where does the money to pay shares come from, and how are they paid? From the productive work performed by the worker-owners — in GT’s case, that work is written and simultaneous translation, copyediting, subtitling, and related services. We will explain the “how” below.

In short, the more effort and care put into the collective, the larger the share. This is not a competitive, game-theory influenced scheme; it’s a solidarity based strategy for economic resistance that allows all members to contribute according to their capacity. All members create value; part of this value is processed through a market interface (the agency) and is converted into monetary value, which is then pooled and distributed to benefit all value streams. We call this value sovereignty. And, although the default decision making protocol is virtually identical to a traditional coop’s “one member, one vote” principle, your shares can influence decision making in critical situations, such as blocked proposal.

How is this type of share-holding a contrast to that found in a corporation? Let’s break down the differences. While shareholders in a corporation accrue power through money, in our model, power is treated differently. The descriptions are power-to and power-with, accrued via productive and reproductive work taken for the health of the collective and the Commons. A corporation (or a start-up, or any capitalist business) employs wage labor to produce profit-maximizing commodities through privately owned and managed productive infrastructures. By contrast, in an Open Coop, we work together for social and environmental purposes while also creating commons and building community, locally and/or globally. The model allows us to turn our talents to worthwhile, not dead-end, causes. This is how we are practicing economic resistance.

The Open Coop Governance Model in Guerrilla Translation: How does it work?

We have established that Guerrilla Translators perform two types of productive work: pro-bono and paid (more about reproductive or care work later). If we take written translation as an example, both types are essentially identical. They are performed by the same team, using the same methods, working collectively, and sharing both the work and the eventual rewards. So, what are the differences?

Pro-bono translations are the ones we choose to do ourselves, based on our enthusiasm for the original material and well aligned with our values. This doesn’t make us unpaid volunteers, though. It all boils down to the way we choose to distribute value. To us, a pro-bono or a paid translation has the same value – literally. We assign a (cost) value for all work we do, whether it’s a self-selected pro-bono piece for publication on our blog, or work contracted by a client. Our model of income distribution diverts a portion of every paid/contracted job towards fulfilling the value of the pro-bono work shares accrued by our members. This has several functions. First, it allows all members of the collective to gain an amount of income from their productive work, whether it was pro-bono or paid. Second, collective members are not put into competition among themselves for paid work, nor for the “best” paid work (based on the per-word rate). All work is valued internally at the same rate, regardless of the external prices which are variable.

We have several pricing tiers for our clients. Metaphorically, there’s a pay-it-forward spirit involved here on the client side, but it’s more like pay-it-backward-and-forward internally in the collective. Clients with the greatest financial means who are aligned with our principles and wish to provide support for our knowledge commons are offered the top tier rate – this is still quite competitive, in fact at the lower end of typical translation pricing. There will be a penny or two per word that these clients are directly donating to our pro-bono shares and also towards any contract jobs we accept for clients with minimal or bare-bones budgets (including small co-ops, activist collectives, non-VC startups, and others). This sliding scale helps us nurture relationships and help support collectives and initiatives with the least financial means so it is fair for everyone.

The soft stuff is the hard stuff: the importance of a care work

So far, we have mainly spoken about productive, tangible work: translations, editing, formatting. These tasks are mostly word-based and therefore, easy to quantify and assign credits. But what about everything that leads, directly or indirectly, to paid work? Searching for clients, project management, quality control, relationship and trust building, etc. – all the invisible work that goes into keeping afloat? This is reproductive work, or care work.

In GT. we distinguish between two types of care work: that for the health of the collective, and that for the living beings within.

When talking about caring for the health of the collective, we conceive it as a living entity or system, even a commons. The emergent values of this system are encoded in the governance model and embodied by the collective’s practices and legal-technical structures [3]. To maintain a healthy collective we choose to honour our collective agreements, maintain our communication rhythms, and distribute the care work needed to make the collective thrive. Other ways to care for the health of the collective include coop and business development, seeking and attending to clients, making sure our financials are up to date and everything is paid, maintaining active relationships with authors, publishers, following through on our commitments… everything that you’d consider as “admin” work in a traditional agency or co-op, and on top of that, everything else that’s easily forgotten if you’re not doing it yourself. It’s literally invisible work to those who don’t acknowledge it, and work that many feel unjustifiably obligated to take on.

The difference is that in Guerrilla Translation, these activities aren’t assigned to set roles. Instead, all “caring for the health of the collective” aka care work items are modular, easily visualized, and can be picked up by any collective member. In fact, those members may belong to one or more work circles, which steward certain areas, such as community, sustainability, networking, training, tech, etc.

Additionally, when we speak about care work for the living beings who make the collective, we refer to the individual Guerrilla Translators who mutually build trust and intimacy to care for and support each other. Our cooperative practices should never be solely dependent on technology or protocols, including the governance model. These are only tools to facilitate and strengthen our collaborative culture.

We believe that cooperative cohesion is primarily based on healthy, consent-based heterarchical relationships. To foster these we have committed to certain regular practices, such as mentoring — where we practice and document peer learning in the collective’s tools and practices — and mutual support — where we look after each other and care for our mutual well-being, attuned to everyone’s moods, needs and larger realities beyond the collective.

Every member, whether in training or longstanding, is supported by a specific person who has their back. Every member has someone else’s back. Supported members have a safe space to express themselves to be cared for and heard within the collective. In this relationship, they may also be reminded of their commitments, etc. Conflict resolution is handled through the mutual support system, ensuring the distribution of personal care work. This has been a very basic overview of the model’s structural (credits and shares) and cultural (care work) qualities. If it raises more questions than it answers, or if you’re simply curious, you can read the full model. In the following sections, we will visualize the ways in which the model can work.

What this looks like in practice

Meet “Jill”, a Guerrilla Translator. Today she’s got a little bit of a time and has chosen an article to be translated. Maybe she proposed it, or maybe she picked it up from an existing list of material waiting to be translated. She contacts the author to let her know that GT would like to translate and publish the article, and asks for any required permission if necessary, etc.

This describes a pro-bono translation. Jill will work alongside “María”, a copyeditor, and “Deb”, who’ll take care of the web formatting and social media promotion of the article.

The article is 1000 words long. This wordcount is processed through GT’s internal credits protocol, with this pro-bono translation valued at 0,16 credits per word. Once completed, 160 Love credits will be created. This is how they are split:

80 for the translation (Jill)

40 for the copyediting/proofreading (María)

10 for pre production (Jill, as she chose the article and contacted the author)

20 for formatting (Deb)

10 for post production (Deb, as she will be promoting the translation doing social media, etc) [4]

Let’s imagine that this is the first time that Jill, Maria and Deb have done a pro-bono project for GT. Once the project is accounted for, their respective pro-bono shares will look like this:

Jill has accrued 90 Love Credits

María has accrued 40 Love Credits

Deb has accrued 30 Love Credits

A week passes, and an author or client wants to contract GT to translate an article. This is called livelihood work. The material is chosen by the client (obviously), and the deadline negotiated with the collective. Coincidentally, the text to be translated is also 1000 words long (amazing how our examples are identical!). GT’s agency side uses a sliding scale for prices. This client is a small, open source-oriented NGO, so the price is quoted at 0,12 € per word. The team will be Jill as the translator and María as the editor. Note that unlike the pro-bono translation above, there is no web formatting to be done. Once the translation is completed, the client owes GT 120 €, but this money will not be paid directly to Jill and María as income. This money will be held until the end of the month in a digital trust dedicated to maintaining health of the collective. Meanwhile, once the translation is complete and sent to the client, Jill and Maria will have accrued the following Livelihood Credits:

Jill has accrued 80 Livelihood Credits

María has accrued 40 Livelihood Credits

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume that these are the only pro bono and agency translations undertaken in the history of the collective. Now it’s getting toward the end of the month and the Guerilla Translators are ready to distribute! There are exactly 120 euros in the bank account [5]. This is how they will be distributed:

75% of the funds will fulfill Livelihood credit shares

25% will fulfill Pro-bono credit shares

These percentages have been chosen to balance the time needed for paid work while not forgetting to set aside some time for the vital pro-bono side. Now, we will divest those 120 € within the trust and into two “streams”:

The Livelihood Stream receives a total of 90,00 €

The Love Stream receives a total of 30,00 €

This is now divided among the member’s shares in the following way:

Livelihood Stream: Jill holds 67% of the “shares” (80 credits of 120 total), while María has 33% (40 credits of a 120 total). So out of 88,80 € allocated for the Livelihood Stream, Jill will receive 60,30 €. María receives 29,70 €.

Love Stream: Jill holds 56% of the shares (90 credits of 160 total). María has 25% (40 out of 160) and Deb has 19% (30 out of 160). So, out of 30 € allocated for the Love Stream, Jill will receive 16,80 €, María 7,50 € and Deb 5,70 €.

Totalled up, this is the money that gets paid to the three active members:

Jill receives 77,10 € (her Livelihood and Love work combined)

María receives 37,20 € (her Livelihood and Love work combined)

Deb receives 5,70 € (Just Love work, as Deb hasn’t performed any livelihood work this month)

This totals 120 €. Magic!

One example among many

This is one situation. During another month, María may have done much more editing work, which takes less time than translation. Deb may have done more care work (more on that later) in both the Love and Livelihood streams. New people may have come in, maybe there’s been a windfall! The model can account for all these and other possibilities while also being dynamic in changing circumstances. It’s a “Team Human” model where the technology is kept flexible, and updates to serve the qualitative experiences of the collective, not just the measurable ones.

The secret life of Livelihood, Love and the ways of measuring credits

As you may have noticed, if 1 love credit equals 1 euro, in the example above we’ve only paid down 30 Love credits (25% of distributed funds) in euros. As 160 Love credits were created with the pro-bono translation, this still leaves 130 which haven’t been paid in money.

The credits that have been converted into money and transferred to individual’s accounts are called Divested credits, ie: they’ve been paid down. The unpaid credits are considered Invested credits: active credits that have yet to be paid. If you think about it, on a month by month basis 75% of Love credits will be “invested” rather than divested/paid. In essence, the coop has an ongoing debt with its own pro-bono/Love stream which will be paid back on a rolling basis. [6]

The same situation is also applicable to Livelihood credits. As 75% of earned credits are divested, 25% will remain invested. Both types of credits (Love and Livelihood) can be divested or invested. Meanwhile, the sum of both are considered Historical credits.

“Why so many? So confusing!” Yeah okay, but complexity allows for dynamism, nuance and catering for the different life circumstances and preferences of Guerrilla Translators. Reality is complex, and we want this to work in many real situations.

For now, it’s important to make clear that the total amount of historical credits you have accrued reflect your investment in the organization. Whether it’s productive or reproductive work, it all gets tracked: this informs our governance.

While in typical daily situations, all Guerrilla Translators have what amounts to “one member one vote” rights, historical credits come into play when making critical decisions such as blocked discussions, large structural changes to the governance model, and legal structure changes. In these rare yet important situations, votes can be weighed against an individual’s historical credits.

Meanwhile, the invested/divested ratio helps clarify which members are prioritized for Livelihood work. Given that livelihood work gets divested at a 75% higher rate than Love work, we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to perform it, and that incoming work is offered to those with a higher invested ration first. Similarly, when measuring care work the invested/divested ratios helps clarify when individuals may be benefitting monetarily in lieu of caring for the collective (and its members). In these cases, the ratio is used to determine whether to divest less and agree to a renewed commitment to care work.

In essence, care work is measured in hours, not credits, but it is only entrusted to members who have already gone through a 9-month “dating” phase before becoming fully committed members. All care work hours are instantly turned into historical credits. The Governance Model also describes two scenarios for care work hours: one in which these are paid from an seed-funding pool and a second when once the Open Coop is stable, it is entirely demonetised, with members committing to a set amount of hours each month and adjusting accordingly when there are any discrepancies. [7]

Why have we chosen this model?

Imagine that María is single mother with two kids to take care of. She wants to do socially useful work, but her material realities don’t allow her that privilege. By working with Guerrilla Translation she a) can perform paid/livelihood work for causes that matter and b) will not “lose” income by doing pro-bono work – ie, translations that would not otherwise get funded, but which should still be translated.

In fact, she could spend most of her time just doing paid/livelihood work, and it would still benefit the pro-bono/love side (and vice versa). The model addresses the possibility of internal competition for “paid work” overshadowing the social/activist mission of the collective. In short, contributing to the Commons also makes your livelihood more resilient. In turn, you make the Commons more resilient by creating new commons and facilitating communications. The same can be said about care work. The more you demonstrate care for the collective, the more resilient and healthy it will be. If any member can’t contribute a similar proportion of care work as the rest, the member will simply have a proportional amount of their credits deducted and will be encouraged to compensate by committing to more care hours.

In summary, the model is designed to find an optimum balance between paid, pro bono and reproductive work, with equity and continued dialogue at the center.

If you are interested in joining or collaborating with Guerrilla Translation, or are researching or writing about new forms of commons-oriented accounting (and accountability!), you are now much better prepared to grasp the model in its entirety:

Meanwhile, for easy reference we are providing below a summary of the model’s main featured and a list of the materials that influenced its creation.

Open Coop Governance Model TLDR

In short: Guerrilla Translators undertake both pro-bono and paid translation/editing work. These types of productive work are accounted for in internal credits (1 credit = 1 Euro), creating shares. Net funds held in GT’s account are then distributed on a monthly basis: 75% of these are used to pay down members’ agency (livelihood) shares. The remaining 25% is used to pay for pro bono (love) shares. Reproductive work is tallied in hours and distributed according to each members ratio of benefits vs. contributions.

Below is the protocol for the model’s main characteristics. These can be applied as a bare-bones formula for other commons-oriented service collectives. Hyperlinks direct to specific sections of the full governance model text or to the Guerrilla Media Collective Wiki.

Suggested Reading

First is a summary article of our GT Reloaded event, documenting the main discussions and takeaways from the encounter, where we picked apart and reimagined the governance model:

Punk Elegance: How Guerrilla Translation reimagined itself for Open Cooperativism(article) “The future of the project seems really bright because of the clarity of vision. Doing meaningful social and political work for groups and projects isn’t just an afterthought. The determination to build that into the org structure speaks volumes to the wisdom of the group: that investment of time is powerful, that translators and editors should be able to openly do passion work, following their hearts together, and that collective prioritization teaches everyone involved, and nurtures and hones shared values.” See also the Guerrilla Translation Reloaded Full Workshop Report for a more detailed account.

Following is a list of articles, papers, videos on things that have influenced our governance model and general philosophy. They also explore some of the tensions we have tried to reconcile: between metrics and the immeasurable, system design and lived experience, and productive and reproductive work.

Patterns for Decentralised Governance and why Blockchain Doesn’t Decentralise Power… Unless You Design It To(Video and article) “There is a lot of anticipation for how blockchain and other decentralising technologies are going to drastically reshape society, but do they address power? “If you take a step back from the technology, if you look at the challenges we face in wider society, and you look at the history of social change, if you step back and just consider for a minute: “how can we decentralise power?”, then “build a better database” feels like a pretty weak answer. To me, it seems obvious that some of the most urgent power imbalances fall on gender, race, and class lines.”

Patterns for Decentralised Organising (e-book) “I’m not so interested in what you’re working on together, I’m just going to focus on how you do it. To my way of thinking, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to build a better electric vehicle, or develop government policy, or blockade a pipeline; whenever you work with a group of people on a shared objective, there’s some stuff you’re going to deal with, some challenges. How do we decide what we’re working on? who does what? who can join our team? what are our expectations for each other? what happens when someone doesn’t fulfill those expectations? what do we do with disagreement? how do decisions get made?”[8]

The Financialization of Life (article). “Do we want everything in life to be a transaction, as the market totalitarians propose? Or do we want to be citizen-commoners, co-creating shared value in freely associating communities? These differences matter, and Salvatore Iaconesi has written a brilliant analysis of the potential dangers of uncritically applying the blockchain to human life.”

Re-imagining Value: Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature (booklet). “What is “value” and how shall we protect it? It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer. For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. This report explains that how we define value says a lot about what we care about and how we make sense of things — and the political agendas we pursue.”

There is an alternative: participatory economics (interview) In this interview, Michael Albert — co-founder of Znet — reflects on the vision of participatory economics, and how it could take us beyond capitalism. “For the Occupy movements, and for other projects and movements which are rousing and continuing all around the world, to all together merge into a massive project that is truly oriented to engender a classless, feminist, inter-communalist, participatory future — I think their membership will have to be in command, not some elite at the helm. And I think those memberships will have to know the broad defining attributes of where they are trying to go, so they use tactics and strategies consistent with getting there.”

From Platform to Open Cooperativism(article) “Two cooperative movements are important in this discussion: Platform Cooperativism, and Open Cooperativism. One may be more publicly visible right now, but they have much in common. These movements marry the power of digital networks with the rich history of the cooperative movement. How do these approaches compare? Are they redundant, complementary, mutually exclusive? What exact problems do they solve, and what outcome do they seek? In this article, we explain their origins and characteristics, and see how the actions proposed by these movements can work together, helping us form resilient livelihoods in our networked age.”

Why do we need a contribution accounting system?(article) “With the advent of the Internet and the development of new digital technologies, the economy is following a trend of decentralization. The most innovative environments are open source communities and peer production is on the rise. The crowd innovates and produces. But the crowd is organized in loose networks, it is geographically dispersed, and contributions to projects follow a long tail distribution. What are the possible reward mechanisms in this new economy?”

Blockchain technology : toward a decentralized governance of digital platforms?(academic paper) “In the same way, blockchain technology has enabled the emergence of new projects and initiatives designed around to the principles of decentralization and disintermediation, providing a new platform for large-scale experimentation in the design of new economic and organisational structures. Yet, to be really transformative, these initiatives need to transcend the current models of protocol-based governance and game-theoretical incentives, which can easily be co-opted by powerful actors, and come up with new governance models combining both on-chain and off-chain governance rules. The former can be used to support new mechanisms of regulation by code, novel incentivization schemes and a new sense of ownership over digital assets, whereas the latter are necessary to promote the vision, and facilitate the interaction of commons-based projects and initiatives with the existing legal and societal framework.”

Blockchain Just Isn’t As Radical As You Want It To Be(article). “Today, Silicon Valley appropriates so many of the ideas of the left —anarchism, mobility, and cooperation— even limited forms of welfare. This can create the sense that technical fixes like the blockchain are part of some broader shift to a post-capitalist society, when this shift has not taken place. Indeed, the blockchain applications that are really gaining traction are those developed by large banks in collaboration with tech startups — applications to build private blockchains for greater asset management or automatic credit clearing between banks, or to allow cultural industries to combat piracy in a distributed network and manage the sale and ownership of digital goods more efficiently.”

Footnotes

Jump up↑The original Better Means Governance Model can be read here. The changes have been so substantial that it should not be taken as a reflection of our current governance model, but mainly an inspiration.

Jump up↑From Wikipedia’s entry on Feminist Economics: “While economics traditionally focused on markets and masculine-associated ideas of autonomy, abstraction and logic, feminist economists call for a fuller exploration of economic life, including such “culturally feminine” topics such as family economics, and examining the importance of connections, concreteness, and emotion in explaining economic phenomena”

Jump up↑For the sake of simplicity we have made the amount in the bank identical to the invoiced amount (120 eu). Of course, in real life, part of the proceeds of livelihood work go toward paying taxes, fixed expenses and a community savings pool. You can read more about that in this section of the model: The Monthly Payment Pipeline

Who we’ve been, who we are becoming

If you’re not familiar with Guerrilla Translation (GT), here is what you should know. Founded in Madrid in 2013 and inspired by the 15M and Occupy movements, GT is a P2P and commons-oriented translation collective. It was conceived as a new kind of livelihood vehicle for activist translators that combines two compatible functions: a voluntary translation collective working for activist causes (eg. social, environmental, etc.) and an agency providing translation and general communication services on a paid contract basis. The proceeds from this paid commissioned work go, in part, toward financing the social mission by retroactively paying translators for their voluntary (aka ‘pro-bono’) work. Sounds simple, right? But, as we soon found out, when trying to do something from scratch that’s radically new and commons-oriented, the devil is in the details.

The first thing we realized back in 2014 was that we needed a better system to organize the paid and pro-bono work. We decided to adapt an abandoned open-source governance model and orient it towards our ideology and needs (the original had a strongly traditional “startup” flavor). We discussed it for more than a year but, due to lack of engagement, we never arrived at a final version. Meanwhile, GT was thriving: we were well regarded in our community, our translations were reaching more people than ever and we had an increasing stream of work offers. At the same time there was an imbalance between readily recognized productive labour, and all the invisible, reproductive work required to keep the project healthy.

Frustrated with this imbalance, some of us decided to take an extended sabbatical from the project. An exception to this pause was our very successful crowdfund campaign to translate and publish David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner, a Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. The campaign was important in several aspects, including the use of the Peer Production License and an innovative, distributed publishing model dubbed “Think Global, Print Local”. The lead-up to the campaign saw renewed activity on the pro-bono side, and the crowdfund succeeded in its objectives, leading to a book launch in the fall of 2016.

But after the crowdfund, GT still suffered from the same mixed condition: solid social capital, continued offers of paid work, but no clear governance structures to ensure a fair distribution of work and rewards whilst maintaining its social mission.

By 2017, the remaining team had achieved a very high level of interpersonal trust. It seemed like the right time to clarify our goals and values, revisit the unfinished governance model, and review nearly 5 years of lessons learned. To “reload” GT in an organised and sustainable way, we clearly needed an in-person meeting. We began to shape our ideal meeting, determining our goals and target invitees. Next, we got in touch with friendly experts in fields including tech, decentralised/non-hierarchical organizations, facilitation, and governance, inviting them to help us develop the governance model and a long-term survival strategy for GT.

For the financial support we needed to host the meeting, we turned to Fundaction, a Europe-wide participatory grantmaking platform focused on social transformation. Fundaction offers several types of grants, among them Rethink, directed at exchange — and capacity building — activities and networking. We applied for the Renew grant in November of 2017. In late December 2017, the first round of voting for Rethink proposals was closed, and in January 2018, there was an official announcement of the Rethink grant awardees, with Guerrilla Translation as one of the 8 winning applications. We felt humble and grateful to have received this support and validation (highest number of votes received!), and remain thankful to Fundaction.

Rethinking among mountains and rivers

Hervás is a small mountain village in Extremadura, western Spain, where Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso (Guerrilla Translation’s cofounders) reside. Declared as an anarchist canton in the 1st Spanish Revolution and surrounded by beautiful nature, it seemed like the perfect (and cheapest!) place to host an fruitful encounter among the Guerrilla Translators and friends.

Prior to the encounter, we drafted a first version0 of “The Open Cooperative Cooperative Governance model”, inspired by the original, but tailored to fit the ideals of Open Cooperativism — a method combining the ideas of the Commons and Free Culture with the rich social tradition of the Cooperative movement. We wanted to provide a “graspable object for the workshop participants to engage with, critique and develop.

We created a project budget and an ideal guest list, and after many conversations and calendar reviews, we invited seven people external to the collective, including:

These invited mentors were selected not only for their professional affiliation and relevant knowledge, but also for some of their personal qualities. We imagined how these people could interact as a group, and also serve as allies to the collective ongoing. The final composition of the workshop had a female-male ratio of 10 to 3, which reflects Guerrilla Translation’s own gender ratio.

Five of the six currently active members (Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate, Lara San Mamés, Stacco Troncoso, and Ann Marie Utratel) represented GT in the meeting. Finally, Lucas Tello from Zemos98 was hired for workshop methodology and facilitation.

A most convivial workshop

From May 22nd to 24th, 2018, we worked together on Guerrilla Translation’s goals, values and future directions, while also building connections, mutual support and a convivial atmosphere.

Zemos 98 designed a methodology, in collaboration with GT, supporting inclusive collaborative processes, trusting peer to peer knowledge and accepting diversity as an intellectual basis for collective work.

On day one, participants split into two groups and began to define GT’s values and goals. Values included peer to peer learning, clarity, diversity, resilience connected to systemic self-reflection, fairness, adaptability, commoning, equity, intimacy, high quality crafted work, and being prefigurative while aspiring to political transformation through relationships within and beyond the collective.

Some fun portmanteaus and ideas emerged out of this exercise, including “Trustparency” (blend of trust and transparency) and “Simplexity” (acknowledging the need for a balance of complexity and simplicity). Another idea which struck a chord with everyone was the idea of “Punk Elegance”. It reflects that GT comes from a non-conformist, DIY/DIWO culture but still seeks high quality, aesthetic style and communicational mastery.

“My main reflection from the event is that we went to work on one collective but in the process, it felt like we were all working on all of our collectives all at once. ” – Richard D. Bartlett

Turning to the Goals, the teams saw GT as a space to concentrate on mentorship and peer to peer learning. Obviously this applies to mentorship in creating high quality, handcrafted translations and other communication strategies, but also to fostering collaborative culture. As a project, GT demonstrates that an alternative, post-capitalist economy is possible and can thrive on several levels. A first step is to offer translators (and other media workers) a way to do paid work apart from capitalist structures, and simultaneously create a translingual knowledge commons. GT also has the potential to encourage personal transformation towards commons-oriented futures based on concrete, daily practices (not theoretical frameworks), especially with its focus on the recognition of carework and power. As such, it could be an exemplary project for Open Cooperativism, and a transnationally oriented, multi-constituent space to do socially and ecologically valuable work while also creating commons.

How could we achieve these ambitious goals and hold true to the values? Over the following two and a half days, each group developed distinct prototypes and timelines for GT’s near- and mid-term future. This would help us plan a functioning model and lived practice.

On the third day, the teams presented a summary of their discussions, and their timelines for possible futures. Each team treated the same targets (community, governance, platform and financial), and presented cohesive yet contrasting visions of suggested near-term GT actions. The differences in each team’s results indicate a fundamental balance in all commons: the dialectic between culture (that which defines the group’s shared motivations and visions for the future) and structure (that which formalizes the group culture into recognizable legal/procedural forms). Culture and structure are codependent in a commons: you can’t have one without the other, and their artful balance can create resilient, self-organized communities.

You can read our in-depth workshop report for details of each team’s prototype, but here are some of the main takeaways:

During their presentation, Group 2 (comprised of Richard D. Bartlett, Virginia Díez, Carmen Lozano Bright, Lara San Mamés, Sarah de Heusch and Ann Marie Utratel) focused on group culture, human relationships and trust. The group suggested many strategies based around designing for commitment and valuing reproductive work as equal to productive work. The group argued that a resilient, matured culture needs to be in place to design structures to augment existing, practised values, instead of enforcing them technically.

In discussing business structures and priorities, Group 2 emphasized structural flexibility according to the collective’s needs. Concurrency was introduced, a computational principle describing work that happens not only in parallel (people doing different things), but also in different order (not a chain of dependencies). This concept would prove essential in combining both models. 1

The group imagined a free software digital platform to handle all accounting and transactional aspectsand to clarify the governance agreements forged at the cultural layer. Similar to how a Community Land Trust perpetuates specific social values in a shared ownership structure, the platform represents the collective’s consent to a set of voluntary self-organised rules, while being responsible for overseeing and carrying them out. It transcends the role of a digital “bad cop” often seen in DAOs by functioning as an on-chain core to facilitate continual care-oriented discussions about the collective’s off-chain values. Using easily visualized value streams, Guerrilla Translators would be able to discuss and reprogram the platform to ensure that everyone is heard, and maintain fairness within the collective.

The group also envisioned GT as an educational opportunity for those interested in translation, open cooperativism and non hierarchical organising in digital spaces. The group also worked on the recognition of reproductive work and onboarding strategies for new members. 2

Each group identified qualities already present in the collective: multi-skilled team, peer recognition, established network, good reputation, offers of work, investment potential, attractive branding and an innovative economic/governance model. Historically, the collective has also had a high proportion of female members (75-85%), and has been committed to keeping real-life needs and realities in focus, creating better conditions for digital work.

The needs included a new legal structure and invoicing/payment systems compatible with the model; seed funding for two years to develop both the cultural (community/governance) and structural (platform and legal/financial) aspects of the collective (and open source them to a wider community); the need to incorporate and train new, committed members (to a total between 10 and 15); and adapting the structure to support new spin off collectives of illustrators, coders, designers, etc. Everyone agreed that the GT core team needed a follow up meeting to process the outputs of this workshop and make decisions.

“What a great personal and professional experience GT was. It really made it tangible how strong, efficient, and fun it is to collaborate with people who are professional in what they do, and have different points of view and experiences. That makes collective intelligence really work. It also made clear for me what a woman’s way of dealing with things is; that is, letting emotions and personal aspects come into consideration, in listening and not being an “authority” kind of organization. It was great.” – Sarah de Heusch

The two groups then presented their proposed timelines, and offered mutual feedback. These details aren’t described here 3, but (spoiler alert!) we will recount how the proposed timelines would eventually be merged during the follow-up meeting.

On the final day we met to hold a closing circle. Two questions were asked:

What are you taking home from this encounter?

Would you like to engage with GT ongoing (and how)?

Everyone expressed gratitude about the workshop and towards the production team, especially Lucas Tello, whose unobtrusive yet deeply effective moderation created a solid support and also allowed for plenty of space for a convivial atmosphere. Everyone felt that they had learned a lot — not just about GT or the project, but about themselves and their own groups and collectives. Some people expressed that it was the best workshop event they had ever attended. Everyone was enthusiastic about the social occasions, the sharing of food, being out and about in Hervás, as a part of the bonding and motivating experience.

Vulnerability, transparency and the willingness to explore apparent contradictions and tensions were qualities also appreciated by the group, as well as the cultivation of intimacy as a precondition for creating alternatives to more typically hierarchical or patriarchal relations. Finally, the female to male ratio was also highlighted as a unique feature of the gathering, with the three men present expressing deep gratitude for being in such a space — something they don’t often find available.

The participants agreed to help GT become a flagship project for Open Cooperativism, and the members of GT committed to a follow up meeting to treat the results of the workshop “while the iron was hot”. (This meeting would take place in Hervás in late June, exactly one month after the initial workshop).

Cultivating Culture, Building Structure

The Guerrilla Translation Reloaded workshop was acknowledged by all attendees as a success. GT members and invitees created a spectrum of possibilities, colourful yet tempered by reality and experience. But how could GT make a coherent framework of the suggestions?

After a review of the prototypes, the team decided to hold a series of thematic conversations to reach agreements in key areas. These included how to bring in new members; our community; communication rhythms and tools; our availability and chosen areas of work; how to track and value carework; ways of mentoring and mutually supporting each other; and how to publicly relaunch the project during September 2018.

The core team also agreed to adopt and develop the patterns described in Richard Bartlett’s Patterns for Decentralised Organising. Richard passionately defended the need for more intimacy and group culture during the workshop, and the patterns provide an excellent starting point 4. They are:

Intentionally Produce (Counter) Culture

Systematically Distribute Care Labour

Make Explicit Norms and Boundaries

Keep Talking About Power

Navigating the Communication Landscape

Introduce New Tools With Care

Make Decisions Asynchronously

A Toolbox For Decision-Making

Use Rhythms to Address Information Overload

Generate New Patterns Together

Get Unstuck With An External Peer

Concurrency: A Shared Timeline

Having reached an agreement in most issues, the core group proceeded to create a timeline reflecting the best elements of each prototype. This was no easy task but an overall narrative framework was proposed to help us make sense of what was on the table.

“Concurrency”, seen above, was one of the main features of this framework. As a reminder, this was a concept brought up by Richard Bartlett describing “a computational term that’s a useful management principle: not just that your work can happen in parallel (people doing different things), but in different order (not a chain of dependencies).”

The team was eager to work through the apparent contradictions and form resilient systems, so the timeline was divided into two main sections:

STAGE ONE:Minimum Viable Model (assumed to end between 6 and 12 months)

STAGE TWO:Lucas 9000 (assumed to begin between 6 and 18 months)

The flexibility in how these relative stages begin and end is due to the unpredictable nature of concurrent events. Stage One has many of the Culture fostering ideas expressed by Group 2. Most of the Structural ideas proposed by Group 1 start concurrently in this first Stage but more slowly, maturing further in Stage 2. Each stage has its characteristic features:

Stage One

Stage One is characterized by the use of a Minimum Viable (MVM) Economic/ Governance model. This is based on immediate implementation (if not full execution) of the Open Coop Governance Model, including changes agreed on post-meeting. Stage One would prioritize three lines of work:

Research and implementation of MVM legal structure: Including options such as: an association in Spain, the “group hub” equivalent of SMart, Open Collective, or an Estonian e-company, as possible ways for the collective to invoice and receive funding.

Community Building: Applies to the existing community (and its tools and processes), and additional community members via a handbook, selected outreach, etc. This includes prospective work circles.

Project Funding: Seeds funds are required to support the first two main goals and other specifics for GT to mature into Commons-oriented Open Coop. This targeted work involves detailed project proposals, budgeting and alliances.

During Stage One, the team would use their existing communication and workflow tools as a sandbox for Stage Two.

Stage Two

Stage Two is characterized by the implementation of Lucas 9000, the “One Stop Shop”, all-in-one tool for Guerrilla Translation’s needs.

Conceived as being built “with, and on” Holo, following Emaline Friedman’s suggestions in Group 1, Stage Two sees GT as a DCO or “Distributed, Cooperative Organization”, a spin/critique of Ethereum-based “Decentralized, Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs). The latter are code-based entities capable of executing payments, levying penalties, and enforcing terms and contracts without human interaction. Lucas 9000 will be agent-centric, serving the ideas and core values of the human Guerrilla Translators.

With Lucas 9000 implemented as an Open Cooperative DCO, Guerrilla Translation will use this Holo-based platform to process financial transactions (external invoicing, pro-bono work, hours-based carework metrics). The legal structure would be built around this distributed cooperative framework, based on Holo’s emergent network and with HoloFuel (Holo’s recently created non volatile and asset backed cryptocurrency) as a medium of exchange. Lucas 9000 would also provide clear, visual, information about the health of the collective, facilitating community conversations, and a suite of open source tools (dApps) to manage workflow and collaborations.

All community work during Stage One is further developed in Stage Two, where the collective foresees a multi-lingual, globally distributed team working through the platform, informing its community-centered development as well as fluid working circles attending to the collective’s needs.

“The future of the project seems really bright because of the clarity of vision. Doing meaningful social and political work for groups and projects isn’t just an afterthought. The determination to build that into the org structure speaks volumes to the wisdom of the group: that investment of time is powerful, that translators and editors should be able to openly do passion work, following their hearts together, and that collective prioritization teaches everyone involved, and nurtures and hones shared values. And I can’t leave out something about prototyping alongside sheeps playfully chasing each other and goats bleating…” – Emaline Friedman

The Lucas Plan: A Synthesized Timeline

The synthesized timeline was named “The Lucas Plan” 5. The team scheduled all agreed tasks from each timeline over a two year period, following the general framework described above.

The synthesized timeline can also be consulted ongoing as a spreadsheet here.

What now for Guerrilla Translation?

At the time of writing (late August 2018), the Guerrilla Translation gang is feeling energized and inspired to carry out our tasks.

As a Community, we are mapping our capacities, setting our community rhythms, reclaiming GT’s social capital, stating our commitments, and mentoring and supporting each other. We are drafting a first version of the Guerrilla Translation handbook and contacting specific translators.

In Governance, we are researching legal structures in Stage 1 of the timeline. We are also updating the governance model with all the knowledge and decisions made after GT Reloaded. We are also beginning to gradually implement it.

Financial tasks include creating both project budgets according to our timeline and detailed funding proposals, and sharing these with prospective partners. We are also exploring new income streams.

In Tech, we are clarifying and training in our workflow/ communication tools, updating the websites, and collaborating closely with Holo for future implementation of Lucas 9000.

If you want to know more, the full workshop report detailing our conversations and decisions is accessible. If you’re interested in collaborating with us as an individual or organization, we recommend you read the full report.

We are excited and ready for this journey. Guerrilla Translation has gone through many iterations, changes, disappointments and successes since its founding in 2013. We are all older, wiser, and hopefully also humbler and kinder. As we write these words, Guerrilla Translation feels reloaded and ready to dance. Please join us!

Footnotes

0. [The updated version of the Open Coop Governance Model (V 2.0) has been drafted. It is a dramatic overhaul from version 1.0 and can be read here. Complimentary, the version history is listed here]1. [For a full account of Group 2’s findings, read the relevant section of the Guerrilla Translation Full Report in our wiki.]2. [As with Group 2, a full account of Group 1’s presentations can be found here.]3. [Once again, for full details on each group’s procedures and proposals, read our full workshop report.]4. [If you’re interested in Richard D. Barttlet’s and Natalia Lombardo’s excellent work on decentralized, non-hierarchical organizing check out their website: The Hum. We highly recommend their workshops.]5. [This is also a reference to the inspiring British design/technological sovereignty movement in the late seventies]

]]>https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2018/08/22/punk-elegance-how-guerrilla-translation-reimagined-itself-for-open-cooperativism/feed/16495Are the Digital Commons condemned to become “Capital Commons”?https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2018/08/05/are-the-digital-commons-condemned-to-become-capital-commons/
https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2018/08/05/are-the-digital-commons-condemned-to-become-capital-commons/#respondSun, 05 Aug 2018 17:25:48 +0000https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/?p=6428If Google and Facebook are to pay, they must be obliged to do so, just as industrial capitalists have come to be obliged to contribute to the financing of the social state through compulsory contributions. This model must be reinvented today, and we could imagine states – or better still the European Union – subjecting major platforms to taxation in order to finance a social right to the contribution open to individuals.

Translated by Maïa Dereva, edited by Ann Marie Utratel

Last week, Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published a rather surprising article on the Wired site entitled: “Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia”. The starting point of her reasoning was to point out that Wikipedia content is increasingly being used by digital giants, such as Facebook or Google:

You may not realise how ubiquitous Wikipedia is in your everyday life, but its open, collaboratively-curated data is used across semantic, search and structured data platforms on the web. Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Home source Wikipedia articles for general knowledge questions; Google’s knowledge panel features Wikipedia content for snippets and essential facts; Quora contributes to and utilises the Wikidata open data project to connect topics and improve user recommendations.

More recently, YouTube and Facebook haveturned to Wikipedia for a new reason: to address their issues around fake news and conspiracy theories. YouTube said that they would begin linking to Wikipedia articles from conspiracy videos, in order to give users additional – often corrective – information about the topic of the video. And Facebook rolled out a feature using Wikipedia’s content to give users more information about the publication source of articles appearing in their feeds.

With Wikipedia being solicited more and more by these big players, Katherine Maher believes that they should contribute in return to help the project to guarantee its sustainability:

But this work isn’t free. If Wikipedia is being asked to help hold back the ugliest parts of the internet, from conspiracy theories to propaganda, then the commons needs sustained, long-term support – and that support should come from those with the biggest monetary stake in the health of our shared digital networks.

The companies which rely on the standards we develop, the libraries we maintain, and the knowledge we curate should invest back. And they should do so with significant, long-term commitments that are commensurate with our value we create. After all, it’s good business: the long-term stability of the commons means we’ll be around for continued use for many years to come.

As the non-profits that make the internet possible, we already know how to advocate for our values. We shouldn’t be afraid to stand up for our value.

An image that makes fun of a famous quote by Bill Gates who had described the Linux project as “communist”. But today, it is Capital that produces or recovers digital Commons – starting with Linux – and maybe that shouldn’t make us laugh.

Digital commons: the problem of sustainability

There is something strange about the director of the Wikimedia Foundation saying this kind of thing. Wikipedia is in fact a project anchored in the philosophy of Free Software and placed under a license (CC-BY-SA) that allows commercial reuse, without discriminating between small and large players. The “SA”, for Share Alike, implies that derivative works made from Wikipedia content are licensed under the same license, but does not prohibit commercial reuse. For Wikidata data, things go even further since this project is licensed under CC0 and does not impose any conditions on reuse, not even mentioning the source.

So, if we stick strictly to the legal plan, players like Facebook or Google are entitled to draw from the content and data of Wikimedia projects to reuse them for their own purposes, without having to contribute financially in return. If they do, it can only be on a purely voluntary basis and that is the only thing Katherine Maher can hope for with her platform: that these companies become patrons by donating money to the Wikimedia Foundation. Google has already done so in the past, with a donation of $2 million in 2010 and another $1 million last year. Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google have also put in place a policy whereby these companies pledge to pay the Wikimedia Foundation the same amount as their individual employees donate.

Should digital giants do more and significantly address the long-term sustainability of the Digital Commons that Wikipedia represents? This question refers to reciprocity for the Commons, which is both absolutely essential and very ambivalent. If we broaden the perspective to free software, it is clear that these Commons have become an essential infrastructure without which the Internet could no longer function today (90% of the world’s servers run on Linux, 25% of websites use WordPress, etc.) But many of these projects suffer from maintenance and financing problems, because their development depends on communities whose means are unrelated to the size of the resources they make available to the whole world. This is shown very well in the book, “What are our digital infrastructures based on? The invisible work of web makers”, by Nadia Eghbal:

Today, almost all commonly used software depends on open source code, created and maintained by communities of developers and other talents. This code can be taken up, modified and used by anyone, company or individual, to create their own software. Shared, this code thus constitutes the digital infrastructure of today’s society…whose foundations threaten, however, to yield under demand!

Indeed, in a world governed by technology, whether Fortune 500 companies, governments, large software companies or startups, we are increasing the burden on those who produce and maintain this shared infrastructure. However, as these communities are quite discreet, it has taken a long time for users to become aware of this.

Like physical infrastructure, however, digital infrastructure requires regular maintenance and servicing. Faced with unprecedented demand, if we do not support this infrastructure, the consequences will be many.

This situation corresponds to a form of tragedy of the Commons, but of a different nature from that which can strike material resources. Indeed, intangible resources, such as software or data, cannot by definition be over-exploited and they even increase in value as they are used more and more. But tragedy can strike the communities that participate in the development and maintenance of these digital commons. When the core of individual contributors shrinks and their strengths are exhausted, information resources lose quality and can eventually wither away.

The progression of the “Capital Commons”

Market players are well aware of this problem, and when their activity depends on a Digital Commons, they usually end up contributing to its maintenance in return. The best known example of this is Linux software, often correctly cited as one of the most beautiful achievements of FOSS. As the cornerstone of the digital environment, the Linux operating system was eventually integrated into the strategies of large companies such as IBM, Samsung, Intel, RedHat, Oracle and many others (including today Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook). Originally developed as a community project based on contributions from volunteer developers, Linux has profoundly changed in nature over time. Today, more than 90% of the contributions to the software are made by professional developers, paid by companies. The Tragedy of the Commons “by exhaustion” that threatens many Open Source projects has therefore been averted with regard to Linux, but only by “re-internalizing” contributors in the form of employees (a movement that is symmetrically opposite to that of uberization).

Main contributors to Linux in 2017. Individual volunteer contributors (none) now represent only 7.7% of project participants…

However, this situation is sometimes denounced as a degeneration of contributing projects that, over time, would become “Commons of capital” or “pseudo-Commons of capital”. For example, as Christian Laval explained in a forum:

Large companies create communities of users or consumers to obtain opinions, opinions, suggestions and technical improvements. This is what we call the “pseudo-commons of capital”. Capital is capable of organizing forms of cooperation and sharing for its benefit. In a way, this is indirect and paradoxical proof of the fertility of the common, of its creative and productive capacity. It is a bit the same thing that allowed industrial take-off in the 19th century, when capitalism organised workers’ cooperation in factories and exploited it to its advantage.

If this criticism can quite legitimately be addressed to actors like Uber or AirBnB who divert and capture collaborative dynamics for their own interests, it is more difficult to formulate against a project like Linux. Because large companies that contribute to software development via their employees have not changed the license (GNU-GPL) under which the resource is placed, they can never claim exclusivity. This would call into question the shared usage rights allowing any actor, commercial or not, to use Linux. Thus, there is literally no appropriation of the Common or return to enclosure, even if the use of the software by these companies participates in the accumulation of Capital.

On the other hand, it is obvious that a project which depends more than 90% on the contributions of salaried developers working for large companies is no longer “self-governed” as understood in Commons theory. Admittedly, project governance always formally belongs to the community of developers relying on the Linux Foundation, but you can imagine that the weight of the corporations’ interests must be felt, if only through the ties of subordination weighing on salaried developers. This structural state of economic dependence on these firms does make Linux a “common capital”, although not completely captured and retaining a certain relative autonomy.

How to guarantee the independence of digital Commons?

For a project like Wikipedia, things would probably be different if firms like Google or Facebook answered the call launched by Katherine Maher. The Wikipedia community has strict rules in place regarding paid contributions, which means that you would probably never see 90% of the content produced by employees. Company contributions would likely be in the form of cash payments to the Wikimedia Foundation. However, economic dependence would be no less strong; until now, Wikipedia has ensured its independence basically by relying on individual donations to cover the costs associated with maintaining the project’s infrastructure. This economic dependence would no doubt quickly become a political dependence – which, by the way, the Wikimedia Foundation has already been criticised for, regarding a large number of personalities with direct or indirect links with Google included on its board, to the point of generating strong tensions with the community. The Mozilla Foundation, behind the Firefox browser, has sometimes received similar criticism. Their dependence on Google funding may have attracted rather virulent reproach and doubts about some of its strategic choices.

In the end, this question of the digital Commons’ state of economic dependence is relatively widespread. There are, in reality, very few free projects having reached a significant scale that have not become more or less “Capital Commons”. This progressive satellite-isation is likely to be further exacerbated by the fact that free software communities have placed themselves in a fragile situation by coordinating with infrastructures that can easily be captured by Capital. This is precisely what just happened with Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub. Some may have welcomed the fact that this acquisition reflected a real evolution of Microsoft’s strategy towards Open Source, even that it could be a sign that “free software has won”, as we sometimes hear.

Microsoft was already the firm that devotes the most salaried jobs to Open Source software development (ahead of Facebook…)

But, we can seriously doubt it. Although free software has acquired an infrastructural dimension today – to the point that even a landmark player in proprietary software like Microsoft can no longer ignore it – the developer communities still lack the means of their independence, whether individually (developers employed by large companies are in the majority) or collectively (a lot of free software depends on centralized platforms like GitHub for development). Paradoxically, Microsoft has taken seriously Platform Cooperativism’s watchwords, which emphasize the importance of becoming the owner of the means of production in the digital environment in order to be able to create real alternatives. Over time, Microsoft has become one of the main users of GitHub for developing its own code; logically, it bought the platform to become its master. Meanwhile – and this is something of a grating irony – Trebor Scholz – one of the initiators, along with Nathan Schneider, of the Platform Cooperativism movement – has accepted one million dollars in funding from Google to develop his projects. This amounts to immediately making oneself dependent on one of the main actors of surveillance capitalism, seriously compromising any hope of building real alternatives.

One may wonder if Microsoft has not better understood the principles of Platform Cooperativism than Trebor Scholtz himself, who is its creator!

For now, Wikipedia’s infrastructure is solidly resilient, because the Wikimedia Foundation only manages the servers that host the collaborative encyclopedia’s contents. They have no title to them, because of the free license under which they are placed. GitHub could be bought because it was a classic commercial enterprise, whereas the Wikimedia Foundation would not be able to resell itself, even if players like Google or Apple made an offer. The fact remains that Katherine Maher’s appeal for Google or Facebook funding risks weakening Wikipedia more than anything else, and I find it difficult to see something positive for the Commons. In a way, I would even say that this kind of discourse contributes to the gradual dilution of the notion of Commons that we sometimes see today. We saw it recently with the “Tech For Good” summit organized in Paris by Emmanuel Macron, where actors like Facebook and Uber were invited to discuss their contribution “to the common good”. In the end, this approach is not so different from Katherine Maher’s, who asks that Facebook or Google participate in financing the Wikipedia project, while in no way being able to impose it on them. In both cases, what is very disturbing is that we are regressing to the era of industrial paternalism, as it was at the end of the 19th century, when the big capitalists launched “good works” on a purely voluntary basis to compensate for the human and social damage caused by an unbridled market economy through philanthropy.

Making it possible to impose reciprocity for the Commons on Capital

The Commons are doomed to become nothing more than “Commons of Capital” if they do not give themselves the means to reproduce autonomously without depending on the calculated generosity of large companies who will always find a way to instrumentalize and void them of their capacity to constitute a real alternative. An association like Framasoft has clearly understood that after its program “Dégooglisons Internet”, aimed at creating tools to enable Internet users to break their dependence on GAFAMs, has continued with the Contributopia campaign. This aims to raise public awareness of the need to create a contribution ecosystem that guarantees conditions of long-term sustainability for both individual contributors and collective projects. This is visible now, for example, with the participatory fundraising campaign organized to boost the development of PeerTube, a software allowing the implementation of a distributed architecture for video distribution that could eventually constitute a credible alternative to YouTube.

But with all due respect to Framasoft, it seems to me that the classic “libriste” (free culture activist) approach remains mired in serious contradictions, of which Katherine Maher’s article is also a manifestation. How can we launch a programme such as “Internet Negotiations” that thrashes the model of Surveillance Capitalism, and at the same time continue to defend licences that do not discriminate according to the nature of the actors who reuse resources developed by communities as common goods? There is a schizophrenia here due to a certain form of blindness that has always marked the philosophy of the Libre regarding its apprehension of economic issues. This in turn explains Katherine Maher’s – partly understandable – uneasiness at seeing Wikipedia’s content and data reused by players like Facebook or Google who are at the origin of the centralization and commodification of the Internet.

To escape these increasingly problematic contradictions, we must give ourselves the means to defend the digital Commons sphere on a firmer basis than free licenses allow today. This is what actors who promote “enhanced reciprocity licensing” are trying to achieve, which would prohibit lucrative commercial entities from reusing common resources, or impose funding on them in return. We see this type of proposal in a project like CoopCycle for example, an alternative to Deliveroo; or Uber Eats, which refuses to allow its software to be reused by commercial entities that do not respect the social values it stands for. The aim of this new approach, defended in particular by Michel Bauwens, is to protect an “Economy of the Commons” by enabling it to defend its economic independence and prevent it from gradually being colonised and recovered into “Commons of Capital”.

.

With a project like CHATONS, an actor like Framasoft is no longer so far from embracing such an approach, because to develop its network of alternative hosts, a charter has been drawn up including conditions relating to the social purpose of the companies participating in the operation. It is a first step in the reconciliation between the Free and the SSE, also taking shape through a project like “Plateformes en Communs”, aiming to create a coalition of actors that recognize themselves in both Platform Cooperativism and the Commons. There has to be a way to make these reconciliations stronger, and lead to a clarification of the contradictions still affecting Free Software.

Make no mistake: I am not saying that players like Facebook or Google should not pay to participate in the development of free projects. But unlike Katherine Maher, I think that this should not be done on a voluntary basis, because these donations will only reinforce the power of the large centralized platforms by hastening the transformation of the digital Commons into “Capital Commons”. If Google and Facebook are to pay, they must be obliged to do so, just as industrial capitalists have come to be obliged to contribute to the financing of the social state through compulsory contributions. This model must be reinvented today, and we could imagine states – or better still the European Union – subjecting major platforms to taxation in order to finance a social right to the contribution open to individuals. It would be a step towards this “society of contribution” Framasoft calls for, by giving itself the means to create one beyond surveillance capitalism, which otherwise knows full well how to submit the Commons to its own logic and neutralize their emancipatory potential.

Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratel

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the mid-nineties, there was much talk of pensée unique, singlemindedness or “single thought”[1]: a discourse affirming market democracy as the only imaginable and discernable framework for common life. As Noam Chomsky would caution, the only strategy for assuring the uptake of this narrative would be the concentration of information and media, meaning, the consolidation of the voice and the imagination of what is possible. It was the belle époque of neoliberalism.

In her book, Networked Activism and Connected Multitudes (Activismo en red y multitudes conectadas: Comunicación y acción en la era de Internet), Guiomar Rovira tells the story of how that unitary discourse was questioned to open up new possibilities. It began with the emergence of activist networks that, taking advantage of the internet’s open and decentralized infrastructure, created new technological tools to share images, words and feelings distinct from the official narrative. These were the times of Zapatismo and anti-globalization. Later, with Web 2.0, the politicized use of networks became socialized, providing access to anyone. This was the time of connected multitudes, including 15-M and other movements spawned by the crisis.

#YoSoy132

Guiomar’s account distinguishes itself from regular academic production in two ways. To begin with, the book is fundamentally affirmative, rather than critical. It affirms the political power of technologies once people have seized their ownership. The author does not view the world from the angle of power: she does not reinforce our impotence, or how dominated and manipulated we are, nor does she victimize us. On the contrary — she speaks about what’s been done, what’s being done and what can be done. She contemplates the world from the perspective of potentiality.

Secondly, it is a lived book. The author’s personal experiences – through punk, Zapatismo or Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement – form a basis for reflection. Guiomar Rovira is a Catalonian journalist and writer living in Mexico since 1994. She is the author of numerous essays and a teacher in Mexico City’s UAM-Xochimilco University.

Amador Fernández-Savater: “Activist networks” is how you characterize the first historical period described in your book. One of its fundamental ingredients was punk, something that you personally experienced while living in Barcelona during the eighties. How did punk influence the creation of these networks?

Guiomar Rovira: I like it that you want to start there. “No future” is one of the most important messages in punk. In a way, contemplating that “there is no future” opens up a new politics, a much more prefigurative politics. It’s no longer a question of waiting and dreaming of utopias, but of doing what we need to do here and now, and in the ways we can and want to. We’re not waiting for further instructions or permissions to get started. We will take ownership of music and spaces. In punk, anyone can pick up a guitar while someone else starts singing, speaking, doing. This is where we find the DIY spirit, with whatever you have at hand. The cultural becomes political: it is a way to exit the defined boundaries of the system that constantly procrastinates and sacrifices in service to the promise of a non-existent future.

In that sense, from fanzines to squatting, punk is very rich. There is no future, so we have to live. Now. There is no housing, so we have to squat buildings. It’s a movement that also becomes transnational, not embedded in state or national structures but in the spaces in the cities, in the creation of networks. An extended sense-making community. A global movement with its local appropriations, one that needs not ask permission to build a politics and ways of making culture and communicating. A movement where anyone can say what they want to say.

In a way, punk prefigures the hacker mentality. At that time, I was part of a magazine called Lletra A. We made it by cutting and pasting the whole thing manually. We also had a very important network for occupying houses in Barcelona. We opened our modest self-organised social center, el Anti. The idea was, “there is no future, let’s build our lives now”. It wasn’t limited to counter-information, it was about creating a distinct ecosystem.

Zapatismo and the Hope International

Amador: There is a second social movement that would be central to the creation of those activist networks. I’m referring to Zapatismo which, unlike punk, wouldn’t be a “dark” movement. Zapatismo opens a horizon of hope, removed from the metropolis. What can you tell us about the relation between Zapatismo, technologies and communication?

Guiomar: We have to take into account that in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and we lived in a unipolar world marked by the “end of history”. But suddenly, from the most surprising and unexpected place, there is rebellion, hope, and a movement that speaks to us, and where I found myself.

I feel that the significance of Zapatismo is that it allowed for a global common framework. This was a moment marked by despondency across all struggles: the global left was despondent, the Latin American guerrillas were in the doldrums, and so on. Suddenly, an interpellating framework that rescued us from isolated processes of resistance was born. A framework for active mobilization that allows many different struggles to have a shared sense of identity and a common foe. It is humanity against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas say. And who proposed this framework? The indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the most forgotten, the smallest, coming from a corner of the world where many weren’t even aware that there were indigenous communities, or resistance, or the possibility of struggle.

This was still a global media event, accordingly relayed by traditional mass media (newspapers, radio, television). The World Wide Web was barely a year old, hardly anyone was using it. After a few days, though, the newspapers and radio dropped the story. Nevertheless, people sought ways to keep abreast and intervene in what was happening in Chiapas, supporting this rebellion as a locus of hope for the world.

Amador: This is when the appropriation of the Internet takes place. At that time, it was a new means of communication. How did that come about?

Guiomar: The appropriation was almost natural, spontaneous even. Given the lack of information from the traditional media, alternative media moved to occupy that space. Like many others present, I was participating and publishing in hegemonic media, important newspapers…but I was also sending a wealth of information to alternative radio stations, alternative media, fanzines…

Electronic Disturbance Theatre (1998), FloodNet screenshot

In the midst of all this, these gringos (sometimes gringos can also bring about good things!) kept telling us, “you have to use the Internet”. They were the first hackers, tramping around with their spiky hair, installing modems and strange artefacts in your computer. We had no clue what those maniacs were on about. Less than three months later, we were all using the Internet. When I say “all”, I’m referring to the journalists, the NGOs, the activists. The first websites covering the revolution in Chiapas appeared spontaneously. Some US students decided to follow the situation and began publishing the EZLN’s communiqués. These were sent by fax and then published in the website (called Ya Basta). More people turned up spontaneously and started translating to English, French…

That is how information began to be shared and an informational scaffolding was built around the situation in Chiapas. This was huge: at that time the Mexican government was still quite invested in pushing a positive image internationally (that is no longer the case). But information was not the only thing circulating; many people were travelling to Chiapas, visiting the communities, and generating even more information. There were inputs and outputs, a communicative atmosphere supporting an indigenous rebellion and indigenous rebellion proposing the idea that another world is possible. An interpellation finding resonance in many places around the world and allowing for common action, aside from any differences in our ways of doing.

Walter Benjamin: Power above all things

Amador: I want to pose a question a bit beyond our conversation about activist networks and connected multitudes, about the support you find in the classic author Walter Benjamin. What is it about Benjamin, what kind of ally is he?

Guiomar: What I find in Benjamin is a profound metaphorical, poetical and political inspiration. In the darkness of his time he was able to see the light, more so than any other member of the Frankfurt School. Benjamin helps me understand this need of mine to find the power in each moment, each place.

Technique is not our enemy. It also represents the possibility of living in a fuller world, where our covenant with nature is not hostile, nor does it force the violence by which we survive or perish. Predatory capitalism, based on artificially created pain and scarcity, undermines the potential of technique. The blame for the expulsion of life and accumulation through dispossession lies not with the Internet, but with a montage, a global system, that takes technique and, rather than put it in the service of humanity, gifts it to capitalism and the predatory production of scarcity. Benjamin invites us to conceive of another, non-capitalist modernity.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin sees the democratizing possibility enabled by the fact that we can all take ownership of technique, become authors, and have fuller lives, our own voices. There is another idea of his, which appears in Theses on the Philosophy of History, the concept of jetztzeit: the radiant moment that constellates a kind of epiphany in the here and now where everything opens. This is the idea of the constellation, which I keep coming back to in the book. Those that precede us implore us to see that justice is done. At the same time, there isn’t a single genealogy for all movements. Rather, every movement constructs its own history, shines a light on its radiant moments and, from there, articulates its own destiny. It is a tremendously creative way of understanding that the political also represents an opening to the past.

Benjamin is an inspiration. He died in Portbou, my grandparents’ village. This summer I went to see his grave. He lived a terrible life and never achieved the recognition he deserved. Still, he was the most optimistic, the most creative of the intellectuals of his time. It’s ironic that the one who suffers the most is more able to see the openings, the possibilities, the power.

Connected Multitudes: Technology in anyone’s hands.

Amador: First there is networked activism, the appropriation of technology by activists (punk, Zapatismo, the anti-globalization movement), but then there would be a second movement marking a radical transformation from networked activism, which would be the “connected multitudes”. I would like you to tell us about that transition.

Guiomar: The communicative environment of networked activism remains permeated and populated mainly by militants — people with political consciousness. The shift to connected multitudes is highlighted by the fact that the leading voices are no longer limited to those coming from activism. Anyone using a social network has a voice, without necessarily having been previously politicized or part of any specific activist space. And this can happen in politically incorrect spaces like Twitter, or Facebook or YouTube, which are privative networks.

For example, take Mexico’s #Yosoy132 movement. Not all the Ibero-American University students that started the protests were already politicized, but they did feel aggravated, and used tools to voice that discontent and be heard in the media after remarks were made about president Peña Nieto’s visit to their University. The video they uploaded to YouTube had impressive consequences, generating a wave of indignation that many sorts of people felt identified with. Everybody wondered how it was possible that such an important movement hadn’t come from the UNAM[2], or from the groups that had been cutting their teeth for years, denouncing unjust situations. Instead, this came from a totally unexpected, unpredictable collective.

In those protests we see a phenomenon that Manuel Castells calls Mass Self Communication: everyone becomes an information producer, a remixer, a retweeter. Everyone takes part in conversations and strengthens the movement with his or her own ability, for example, graphic arts. The processes of putting out and taking in become fuzzy; the entrenched notions of origin, authority and attribution become somewhat “lossy”.

Amador: The book highlights the positive character of the shift between these two stages of alternative communication. This is a process of democratization: if networks had previously been in the hands of activists, now the political use of technology is in the hands of anyone. But, doesn’t this mean that we’ve also lost sight of the importance of technological infrastructures and technological sovereignty? These elements, crucial to the hacker mentality, seem to have been sidelined in favor of “ease of use” in the distribution of content, thanks to social networks made freely available by the same system we are trying to undermine.

Guiomar: While what you’ve mentioned is undoubtedly important, I can’t fully agree with your assertion of what it is we’ve lost. I think that we’re shifting from a very uninformed and automatic use of networks to a more conscious usage due to the Snowden or Wikileaks revelations on spyware. I think that we’re seeing the emergence of a new movement that is far more aware about surveillance, control and data appropriation in social networks. This awareness is something new and we’ve reached it thanks to the work of certain hackers. I see Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange as hackers. They’ve shown why we need to be careful and use Tor, use free software, why we need to have secure passwords and use the web responsibly. We’ll see what comes of that.

Doing it together

Amador: Instead of intellectuals raising a finger to tell us: “be careful, this is not going well”, what we need is more social appropriation of technology, more learning, more technological literacy, more hacklabs. I think that this is one of the key messages in your book. You acknowledge that the Internet is taking a somber turn, while asserting that the solutions will not be found outside the Internet.

Guiomar: Discursive critiques of technology never solve anything. How can we teach ourselves about sociability in networks? By appropriating spaces, constructing them collaboratively, sharing what we know…by doing what we feel like doing, in ways we feel like doing it, and generating new ways. This is what, in my book, I describe as “hacker unfolding.” This is not just a technological possibility; to me, the concept of hacking goes far beyond technology. The hacker takes something apart to then build something new, deconstructing what is offered as a black box to open new possibilities. And this is not limited to technology, it can be done anywhere. Widen your scope and construct new potentials, whether it’s in the university, or in human relations. As Fernanda Briones, the hackfeminism expert, says “Let’s do it together”.[3]

Amador: How do you consider of the relation between technology and bodies, between the world of bytes and the world of atoms.

Guiomar: My position is that, beyond the differentiation between online and offline worlds, everything occurs on-life. Seen this way, the corporeal experience of encountering is the key. Going out, looking at each other, experiencing the body-to-body connection. Physical encounters, opening spaces for emergence, experimenting with the body’s vulnerability, all of this is essential. The very logic of networks stresses the commonality of how impossible it is to live under the conditions imposed by this expropriating capitalism. This encounter is the quintessential political moment of our times.

To me, this dimension that deals with the vulnerability of the body, this exposition, has transformed voluntary activism into something more alive, less predetermined. The body becomes visible; it interacts and creates convivial, caring spaces while simultaneously politicizing what is private. My current thesis identifies a feministization of connected multitudes, a kind of free appropriation of feminism, a feminism that becomes inevitable. No emancipatory movement can ignore the widely varied approaches to women’s struggles and feminist struggles over the course of time. All of this happens through the body.

Internet feminista y redes libres – Liliana Zaragoza Cano (Lili_Anaz)

Bodies in the street and communication through networks; I can’t think of these as separate. We are a type of cyborg: we carry our own technological extensions. When I think about politics, technology becomes part of collective action. It’s not something additional, or different. If you pay attention, the most important cyberspace and network actions have always taken place within a context of street mobilization. Acting is communicating and vice versa. Everything happens in the on-life dimension. Our brains are the ultimate platform. There is nothing non-physical. The idea that networks are beyond physicality is just dead wrong, and I have put my mind to opposing it.

This text was transcribed from an interview during Guiomar’s book launch. It took place on September 19, 2017 in UAM-Xochimilco. The original Spanish interview was transcribed byGerardo Juárez and edited by Amador Fernández-Savater.

[1]Pensée unique, a term coined by French journalist Jean-François Kahn refers to hegemonic ideological conformism. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

[2]Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México or National Autonomous University of Mexico, one of the world’s highest ranking University in R&D. See the Wikipedia entry for more.

[3] “Hagámoslo juntas” in the original. Spanish is gendered, “juntas” is the female form of “together”. Female (as opposed to the “default” male) grammatical forms have become more commonly used after the 15M movements, such that people of any gender identity more frequently choose to use the female form to describe mixed gender groups.

In this eye-opening dialogue between Franck Gaudichaud and sociologists Miriam Lang and Edgardo Lander the initial promise and subsequent disappointment of 21st Century Socialism is thoroughly analysed in the Venezuelan and Bolivian context. When asked toward the end of the interview what the solutions are, the interviewees stress the importance of self-organised, bottom-up initiatives, alternative currencies and other topics familiar to readers of this blog. They also mention Cecosesola, the forward-thinking network of Venezuelan cooperatives, featured on David Bollier’s and Silke Helfrich’s seminal Patterns of Commoning. The original Spanish text can be found at Viento Sur. This English translation, published onLife on the Left, was produced by Alejandra Guacarán and edited and supervised by Gaudichan, Lang and Lander.

Franck Gaudichaud: Following their participation in the international symposium that we coordinated last June on “Progressive governments and post-neoliberalism in Latin America: End of a golden age?” at the University of Grenoble, France,[1] we thought it would be worthwhile going back over the Latin American context with the sociologists Edgardo Lander (Venezuela) and Miriam Lang (Ecuador). Both of them have a sharp critical view, very often at odds concerning the present scene, and both have participated actively in recent years in the debates on the initial balance sheets of the progressive governments of 1998-2015, in particular those of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Miriam’s case[2] and of the Transnational Institute in Edgardo’s case.[3]

For example, they have written probingly on such topics as the problematics of development and the state, neocolonialism and extractivism, the lefts and the social movements, and both have tackled the difficult issue of conceiving roads of emancipation at times in which humanity is going through a profound ecosystemic crisis of civilization, challenges that mean, inter alia, re-inventing the left and (eco)socialism in the 21st century. — FG

Franck Gaudichaud: In the recent period there have been many debates concerning the end of a cycle of progressive and national-popular governments in Latin America, or rather their possible retreat and loss of political hegemony. What are your thoughts about this debate? From where you stand, can we say that this debate is going beyond the question of an end to a cycle? And what can we say about the present situation compared with the progressive experience from 1999 to 2015?

Edgardo Lander: This is indeed a very intense debate, especially in Latin America, because there had been many expectations about the possibilities for profound transformation in these societies beginning with the victory of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. That was the point of departure of a process of political change that led to the majority of the governments in South America being identified with something referred to as progressive or left-wing in one of their versions. These expectations of transformations that will lead to post-capitalist societies posed severe challenges both in terms of the negative experience of the socialisms of the last century and in terms of new realities like climate change and the limits of the planet Earth that it was necessary to confront. To think about transformation today necessarily means something very different from what it meant in the past century. At a time when the discourse of socialism had practically disappeared from the political grammar in much of the world, it reappears in this new historical moment in South America. Based especially on the struggles of the indigenous peoples, some of these processes seem to incorporate in a very central way a profound questioning of fundamental aspects of what had constituted socialism in the 20th century. Centrally present in part of the imaginaries of the transformation were themes like pluriculturalism, different forms of relationship with the other networks of life, notions of the rights of nature, and conceptions of buen vivir that pointed to a possibility of transformation that could take into account the limitations of the previous processes and open new horizons to address the new conditions of humanity and the planet.

FG: So, we’re talking about the initial period, the beginning, in the early 2000s, when resistance from below was combined with the creation of socio-political dynamics more or less rupturist and post-neoliberal depending on the case, which also happened to emerge on the national electoral and governmental plane.

EL: Yes, in a period in which extraordinary hopes were developing that radical transformations were beginning in society. In the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia, the new governments were a result of the processes of accumulation of forces of social movements and organizations fighting neoliberal governments. The experience of the Indigenous Uprising in Ecuador and the Water War in Bolivia were expressions of societies in movement in which social sectors that were not the most typical in the political action of the left played protagonistic roles. It was a plebeian emergence, social sectors previously invisibilized, indigenous, peasants, urban popular forces, that came to occupy a central place in the political arena. This gave rise to extraordinary expectations.

However, over time severe obstacles appeared. Despite the high-flown rhetoric, important sectors of the left that had leading roles in those processes of struggle had not submitted the experience of 20th century socialism to sufficiently critical thinking. Many of the old ways of understanding leadership, party, vanguard, relations between state and society, economic development, relations with the rest of nature, as well as the weight of the Eurocentric monocultural and patriarchal cosmovisions were present in those processes of change. The historic colonial forms of insertion in the international division of labour and nature were deepened. Obviously, any project that aims at overcoming capitalism in the present world must necessarily deal with the harsh challenges posed by the profound crisis of civilization now facing humanity, in particular the hegemonic logic of endless growth of modernity that has come to overload the planet’s capacity and is undermining the conditions that make possible the reproduction of life.

The experience of the so-called progressive governments is occurring in times in which neoliberal globalization is accelerating, and China is becoming the workshop of the world and the major economy on the planet. That produces a qualitative leap in the demand for and price of commodities: energy resources, minerals and products of agro-industry such as soy. In these conditions, each of the progressive governments has opted to finance the promised social transformations via the deepening of predatory extractivism. This has not only the obvious implications that the productive structurerof these countries is not questioned but also that it is deepened in terms of the neocolonial forms of insertion in the international division of labour and nature. Also, the role of the state is increased as the major recipient of income from the rents produced through the export of commodities. Thus, over and above what the constitutional texts say about plurinationality and interculturalism, there is an overriding conception of the transformation centered primarily on the state and the identification of the state with the common good. This inevitably leads to conflicts over territories, indigenous and peasant rights, struggles for the defence of and acess to water, and resistance to megamining. These popular and territorial struggles have been viewed by these governments as threats to the national project presented, designed and led by the state as representing the national interest. To carry forward their neo-developmentalist projects in the face of this resistance governments have resorted to repression and are taking on increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Defining from the centre which are the priorities, and viewing anything that stands in the way of this priority as a threat, there is established a logic of raison d’état that requires the undermining of the resistance.

In the case of Bolivia and Ecuador this has led to a certain demobilization of the major social organizations as well as divisions promoted by the government in the movements, which has resulted in fragmentations of their social fabric and weakened the democratic transformative energy that characterized them.

FG: In contrast to this analysis, and particularly to what you say about raison d’état, militants and intellectuals participating in those processes as part of the governments and members of pro-government parties argue that in the last analysis the only way to pursue an authentic post-neoliberal course in Latin America was, first, to recover the state through the social and plebeian mobilizations that overthrew the old party-based elites, and after overwhelming anti-oligarchic electoral victories begin using the state (but with links to those below) to distribute and reconstitute the possibility of a “real” alternative to neoliberalism.

Miriam Lang: Before getting into that, I would like to go over again what Edgardo said, because the term “end of cycle” suggests somewhat that we are looking at the whole region in light of the Argentine and Brazilian experience where the Right has indeed come back. However, a more appropriate reading would be to look at how the project of transformation has changed during the years of progressive governments and why now we are in all respects in a different situation than we were 10 or 15 years ago, including in those countries where there are still progressives in the government, as in Bolivia or Ecuador. I am referring to what some call the transformation of the transformations and also the diversity of political tendencies that make up those governments, in which the transformative lefts are not in fact necessarily hegemonic but where the processes have become successful projects of modernization of capitalist relations and insertion in the global market.

FG: After all, you both have a clear critical position on the international division of labour, commodities, the use of extractivism, the problem of the state (often authoritarian and clientelist even today), phenomena that have certainly not disappeared and have even been consolidated in various ways under the progressive governments. But you do not mention here the balsas familia [family allowances], the big reduction in poverty and inequality, the incorporation of subaltern social classes into politics, the reconstruction of basic service systems, of public health, the spectacular growth of infrastructures, etc. during the decade-long golden age of the progressive governments. In short, if I can act as a spokesman for the logic of García Linera, the Bolivian vice-president, you would be those “coffee-shop critics” that he denounces[4] as not having a genuine empathy toward the popular sectors and their day-to-day living conditions. That is, to say the least, a classic argument of the progressive government supporters in their present debate with the critical left.

ML: Well, it depends somewhat on how each of us looks at the reality. If you look, for example, at the new constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador, the transformation project delineated therein goes much further than the reduction of poverty. The previous social struggles, whatever they sought, went much further than a small distribution of income. In saying that I do not want to ignore the fact that the day-to-day life of many people has become easier, at least in those years of high prices for hydrocarbons. But we also have to look beyond the poverty statistics. We can say that so many people have risen above the poverty line, and that’s great, but we can also take a closer look and ask what type of poverty are we talking about? In Latin America poverty is still measured in terms of incomes and consumption; this measures to what degree a household is participating in the capitalist way of life and possibly it says a little about the quality of life of that household. What it does not reveal is the dimensions of the subsistence economies, the dimensions of the quality of human relations, etc. To what degree were people able to really express their needs according to their context? To what degree have these policies of redistribution of income strengthened or expanded territorially the logics of the capitalist market in countries where a large part of the population, because of the enormous cultural diversity that exists, still did not live completely under capitalist precepts?

We could say that this diversity of ways of life constituted a significant transformative potential in terms of horizons for overcoming capitalism. And if we look at the ecological conditions of the planet, many peasant, indigenous, Black or popular urban communities, instead of being labelled as poor or underdeveloped, could have been viewed as examples of how we can consume less and be more satisfied. However, what has happened is precisely what I call the “mechanism of underdevelopment”;[5] in the context of “ending poverty” they are told: your way of life, which requires so little money, is undignified, you have to become more like the urban, capitalist, consumerist population that has to manage money, and the form of exchange in the capitalist market, no other forms of exchange are valid. So-called financial literacy, which was part of the progressive anti-poverty policy, has helped financial capital to establish new credit markets among the poorest people and at much higher interest rates. And the famous introduction to consumption tends to occur in third-rate conditions. So in the end, we have populations that are indebted through consumption because needs have been generated for them that they may not have had in the past. So it depends a little on how we look at these things. It’s a problem of values and perspective, of how we want future generations to live. It’s not simply a question of democratizing consumption; the commitment was to build a world that is sustainable for at least five, six, seven generations to come, and I have serious doubts as to whether this form of erradicating poverty has contributed to those objectives.

EL: In the Venezuelan case, the use of the petroleum rent in a form that differed from how it had been used historically had huge consequences during the first decade of the Chávez government. Social spending came to represent something like 70 percent of the national budget. This public expenditure on health, education, food, housing and social security effectively signified a profound transformation in the living conditions of a majority of the population. Venezuela, which like the rest of Latin America has historically been a country of deep inequalities, not only reduced poverty levels quite significantly (measured by monetary income), but it also managed to sharply reduce inequality. The CEPAL [Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLA, a UN regional commission] has pointed out that Venezuela came to be, along with Uruguay, one of the two least unequal countries on the continent. This was a very major transformation, and it was expressed in such vital matters as a reduction in infant mortality and an increase in the weight and height of children. These are not in any way secondary issues.

On the other hand, this was accompanied from the political standpoint by processes of very broadly based popular organization in which millions of people participated. Some of the most important social policies were designed in such a way that they required the organization of the people in order to function. The best example of this was the Barrio Adentro Mission, a primary healthcare service providing broad coverage to the popular sectors throughout the country, and made possible principally by the participation of Cuban doctors. It was a program that held out the possibility of other forms of understanding public policies in a non-clientelist way that required the participation of the people.

With Barrio Adentro, important steps were begun to transform the country’s healthcare system. It went from a medical system that was fundamentally hospital-based to a decentralized regime with primary services located in the local communities. From a situation in which, for example, a child who was dehydrated in a Caracas neighborhood in the middle of the night had to be transferred, outside the public transit schedule, to the nearest hospital, where the family had to deal with the tragic scenes in the emergency wards, to a situation in which the primary care module, where the physician lives, is a short distance from the child’s home and at any time one can knock on the door and be attended to.

Barrio Adentro was conceived as a project that required community participation in order to function. The doctor, alone, especially if he or she was a Cuban who did not know the neighborhood or the city, could only work with support from the community. This meant, among other things, conducting a census of the community, identifying the women who were pregnant, the children with problems of undernourishment, the elderly, and in general the people with special needs. This was a conception of social policy completely different from some gift from above because it made the community a co-participant in its operation. There was in this dynamic an extraordinarily rich potentiality.

FG: So, has this constituent potentiality, disruptive of the process, been exhausted? Is that what you are saying?

EL: During the years covered by the Bolivarian process not only has the country’s productive structure not been altered but the country has become more highly dependent on petroleum exports. The public policies directed to the popular sectors have been characterized at all times by their distributive character, with a very limited drive toward alternative productive processes to petroleum extractivism. This dependency on high petroleum revenues imposed severe limits on the Bolivarian process.[6]

The dynamic, motivating nature of the popular organizational processes of the public policies was exhausted for various reasons. First, because not all of the Missions (the generic name for the various social programs) were given the resources they had in such areas as the literacy program and Barrio Adentro. But also because the larger-scale organizational processes including the Communal Councils and Communes were processes in which there was always a strong tension between the tendencies toward self-government, autonomy, self-organization, etc., and the fact that almost all the projects that these organizations could carry out depended on transfers of resources from above, from some state institution. This has generated a recurrent tension between the political-financial control from above and the possibilities for more autonomous self-organization. These tensions have operated in quite varied ways, depending on the existing conditions in the location: whether or not local leaderships were present previously; whether or not the community had had experiences in organizing themselves politically prior to the Bolivarian process; and the political conceptions of the functionaries and militants of the PSUV (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela) responsible for relations between the state institutions and these organizations.

The fact is that there has been an extraordinary dependence on the transfer of resources from the state. Most of the popular base organizations had no possibility of autonomy because they lacked their own productive capacity. When the transfers of resources to these organizations declined with the onset of the present economic crisis in 2014, they tended to weaken and many of them went into crisis. Another factor in this weakening has been the creation of the Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción (CLAP) as a mechanism for the distribution of highly subsidized basic food products to the popular neighorhoods. In practice, these have become clientelist organizational methods dedicated exclusively to the distribution of food and lacking any autonomy, and they tend to replace the Communal Councils.

The policies of Latin American solidarity and cooperation have also been highly dependent on petroleum revenues. To carry out international programs like the subsidized provision of oil to Central American and Caribbean countries, or the financial support to Bolivia and Nicaragua, and various other initiatives taken by the Venezuelan government in the Latin American context, it was necessary to guarantee an increase in oil revenues in both the short and medium term. When Chávez passed away in 2013, petroleum accounted for 96 percent of the total value of the exports, and the country was more dependent on oil than it had ever been.

In the history of the Venezuelan oil industry, the first decade of this century was the moment in which there were the best conditions possible for Venezuelan society to debate, think about, and begin to experiment with other practices and other possible futures beyond petroleum. It was a privileged moment for addressing the challenges of the transition toward a post-petroleum society, a conjuncture in which Chávez counted on an extraordinary leadership and legitimacy. He had the ability to give Venezuelan society a sense of direction, and, with oil prices as high as US$140 a barrel, the resources existed to meet the needs of the population and take, albeit initially, steps to a post-petroleum transition. But the opposite occurred. In those years there was a repetition of the intoxication with affluence, the imaginary of the Saudi Venezuela that had characterized the time of the first Carlos Andrés Pérez government in the 1970s.

No one in Venezuela thought it was possible to decree the shutdown of all the oil wells overnight. But government policies, far from taking steps, even timid and initial steps, to overcome dependency on oil, served to deepen that dependency. In conditions of an over-abundance of foreign exchange, with an end to any attempt to slow down capital flight, an absolutely unsustainable controlled exchange rate parity was established. This had the effect of accentuating the so-called Dutch disease, contributing to the dismantling of the country’s productive capacity.

The income distribution programs and the state political initiatives did improve the living conditions of the population and they helped to strengthen the social fabric, with plenty of experiences of popular participation. However, this was not accompanied by a project of transformation of the country’s productive structure. This marked the limits of the Bolivarian process as a project of transformation of Venezuelan society. It means that the broadly-based organizing processes that had involved millions of people were based on redistribution and not on the creation of new productive processes.

FG: Now, again referring to García Linera (as he sometimes summarizes more intelligently what other opinion-makers, followers, and what I call palace intellectuals are trying to say and write along these lines) – according to this Bolivian sociologist and government leader these tensions between state and self-organization, between government and movements, between the demand for buen vivir and extractivism, in the short term, are normal creative tensions in a long process of revolutionary transformation in Latin America. In his view, the radical left critics of the progressive processes do not understand that they are necessary tensions, and he alleges that they want to proclaim socialism by decree.

ML: One problem is that the progressive governments, to the degree that their members came from social movement processes and protests with a left-wing political identity, have taken on a sort of vanguard identity, as if they know what people need. So spaces for real dialogue and partnership with people of a diverse nature have been lost. And political participation has become a type of applause for whatever project the government leaders are proposing. That’s exactly where there is an impoverishment. There are many examples in European history that incline me to think this is an inevitable dynamic, one that we underestimate a lot. The lefts that come to lead in the state apparatus end up immersed in powerful dynamic characteristic of those apparatuses and they are transformed as persons, through the new spaces in which they move, because the logics of their responsibilities provide them with other experiences and begin to shape their political horizons as well as their culture. Their subjectivity is transformed, they embody the exercise of power. And then, if there is no corrective on the part of a strong organized society, that can complain, correct, protest, and criticize, that necessarily has to divert the project.

On the other hand, it is not so much a question of criticizing the time it takes to change things – because in this, I agree, profound transformations need much time, they need a cultural change and this can take generations. It’s a question of looking at the directionality that a political project takes, that is, whether it is going in the right direction or not, at its rhythm. And here I think the question of deepening extractivism and finishing off nature in a country simply cancels out other possibilities of future transformation. If we are closing off certain future options that mattered to us through more short-term calculations, or because of difficulties that occur at the time, then we cannot say it is a question of a temporary nature; it is a question of directionality. You can commercialize or decommercialize, but if you say first I am going to commercialize everything and later decommercialize, it doesn’t seem to me there is much logic. If you say I am decommercializing but I am going to take more time, however here they can see that I am taking steps in the direction indicated, that would be fine. So that way, I think there is a fundamental difference in the reading of the processes.

EL: In the critical debates on extractivism, one of the things I think is essential is, What do we mean by extractivism? If we think of extractivism simply as an economic model, or as Álvaro García Linera says as “a technical relation with nature” that is compatible with any model of society, it could be concluded that it is necessary to deepen extractivism not only in order to meet social demands but also for the purpose of accumulating the necessary resources to invest in alternative productive activities that can help to overcome extractivism. But if extractivism is undertood in broader terms, if it is understood as a relationship of human beings with nature, that it is part of a pattern of accumulation of global capital, a specific form of insertion in the world capitalist system and the international division of labour and nature, and that extractivism generates and reproduces some definite institutionalities, some state models, some behavioural patterns of the state bureaucracy; and if it is understood that extractivism generates social subjects and subjectivities, that it builds a culture, you necessarily reach different conclusions.

Suffice it to look at the hundred years of extractivism in Venezuela. We have established an extremely deep culture as a rich country, an affluent country. Since we have the biggest petroleum reserves on the planet we deserve to have the state satisfy not only our needs but also our aspirations as consumers. We imagine that it is possible to be a society with rights but not responsibilities. We deserve to have free gasoline. These cultural patterns, once they are firmly rooted in the collective imagination, constitute a severe obstacle to a possible transformation not only to overcome capitalism but to confront the crisis of civilization that humanity is now going through. These imagineries of ever-growing material abundance serve to sustain economist/consumerist conceptions of life that leave out a wide range of fundamental matters that we have to confront today. This blocks the possibility of recognizing that the decisions that are taken today have long-term consequences that differ absolutely from what is proclaimed in the official discourse as the future horizon for Venezuelan society.

Based on this gilded imaginery of a land of infinite abundance, large-scale mining in the so-called Arco Minero del Orinoco, for example, is deemed necessary. Through a presidential decree Nicolás Maduro in early 2016 decided to open up 112 thousand square kilometers, a territory the size of Cuba, 12 percent of the national territory, to the major transnational mining companies. This is an area that forms part of the Amazon forest (with the importance this has in the regulation of global climate systems); an area inhabited by various indigenous peoples whose territories were to be demarcated under the 1999 Constitution and whose culture, and their life, is now severely threatened; a territory in which a major portion of the basins of the principal rivers in the country, the principal sources of fresh water, a territory of extraordinary biological diversity, and in which hydro-electricity dams that produce 70 percent of the country’s electricity are located. All of this is threatened in an opening that has been initiated by a call for tenders issued to 150 transnational corporations. It is being designed as a special economic zone that cannot comply with fundamental aspects of the Constitution and laws of the Republic, such as the rights of the indigenous peoples and the environmental and labour legislation. And this is for the purpose of creating more favourable conditions to attract foreign investment. That is how decisions are being taken that are designing a country-wide project that may have consequences over the next 100 years.

FG: Another essential subject for discussion, as I understand it, is the geopolitical problematic, and in this case the advances in regional integration connected to the assessment of the new strategies of imperialism and its interference on the continent. Left critics (Marxists, eco-social activists, feminists, etc.) are often criticized for allegedly underestimating the impact of U.S. intervention or destabilization, and for focusing essentially on an internal critique of the processes and governments. That is what the Argentine sociologist Atilio Borón, among others, says: a number of his writings argue that we have to understand that, moderate as the progressive governments are, they have opened a new wave of integration without the United States, and that this represents a giant step forward in regional history from a Bolivarian perspective. So what do you think about the state of Latin American integration, what are the advances and the limits as of now in this regard?

ML: Ten years ago there were real initiatives and important and encouraging proposals at a global level coming from Latin America, in the sense that regional integration was posed in a different direction from that of the European Union in its neoliberal constitution, especially in the idea that the Banco del Sur was to promote projects of sovereignty and sustainability and not of development in classical terms. Another example was the SUCRE. Unfortunately, these initiatives have not prospered throughout the decade, above all because of resistance from Brazil, which obviously has an important role in the region and is much more oriented toward its partners in the BRICS and prioritizes its interests as a world power.

EL: In the end, Brazil agreed that the Banco del Sur as such should be just one more development bank…

FG: If we look now at the deep crisis in Venezuela, a subject, a drama that has polarized the intellectuals a lot (as of course Venezuelan society), that polarization was presented to us in translation around two international appeals. The first, with Edgardo’s active participation, originated in Venezuela: “Urgent International Call to Stop the Escalation Of Violence in Venezuela. Looking at Venezuela beyond polarization,”[7] that you both signed, the second, the response entitled “Who Will Accuse the Accusers?,[8] by the members of the etwork of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity (REDH), which is quite hostile. One of the central arguments of the REDH members is that the crisis in Venezuela, in their view, is above all a product of imperialist agression and an insurrection of the neoliberal right as well as an “economic war.” They argue that we are in a regional context of a right-wing return, citing the [parliamentary] coup in Brazil, and that this obliges the left to close ranks behind the governments that are confronting this agression, setting aside “secondary contradictions.” The call that you signed, on the contrary says:

“we do not believe, as certain sectors of the Latin American left affirm, that we should acritically defend what is presented as an ‘anti-imperialist and popular government’. The unconditional support offered by certain activists and intellectuals not only reveals an ideological blindness, but is detrimental, as it – regrettably – contributes to the consolidation of an authoritarian regime.”

At this point, how do you read this debate, which was expressed in a number of other documents and exchanges that were sometimes clearly offensive on both sides?

ML: A short while ago a colleague told me that she thought geopolitical views tend to obscure the interests and voices of the peoples. And I don’t know if that is a secondary contradiction. It seems to me that the form in which this confrontation developed was very regrettable because it tended more to close off spaces for reflection than to open them. I think what we need at this point is precisely deeper thinking, spaces for debate and not for closure, if we are to find some solution to the Venezuelan crisis. And I have the feeling that the more alienated people are from the Venezuelan process the more need there is to affirm a sort of identity in solidarity, which is more a sort of anti-imperialist reflex that is fairly abstract, delinked from what goes on day to day in Venezuela. I think the solidarities that we need to build are different. They should not revolve around ourselves, our needs to affirm a political identity like a profession of faith, but be more a joint search for paths forward among concrete peoples. Solidarity should be with the actually existing people, who often do not have the same interests as the government.

And this brings me to a self-criticism, Recently, I returned to Venezuela and had an opportunity to chat with some sectors of critical Chavismo, and it was only then that I learned how that camp has been transformed in recent years. And how complicated it is to express solidarity, in a critical and differentiated way, in the hyperpolarized scenario that exists today. The call that I signed at best should have been given more thought, more discussion before it was circulated, and I should have taken more time discussing it with the various sectors of critical Chavismo before signing it, precisely in order to be more coherent with my own thinking. While I continue to think that it is necessary to defend democratic institutionality and certain liberal values, as the call does, we have to broaden and deepen them while at the same time defending them as results of past struggles. And above all, I think that external agression can never justify the errors that are being made internally.

This polarization that has occurred in Venezuela and in other countries as well, which does not allow any grey shading beyond black and white, is very negative and very harmful to the transformation. It makes it very hard to express solidarity without causing damage on one side or another. As a feminist, I also feel that the form in which this whole debate is taking place is extremely patriarchal, plagued with simplistic binaries, agressive logics and self-gratifyng egos while what we should be doing is building links and other forms of doing politics, that is, accompanying ourselves in the search for alternative roads.

FG: In fact, it seems that a certain dialectic of critical thinking has been lost in this debate.[9] Concerning the polarization in Venezuela, the unconditional defenders of Maduro argue that the polarization is principally between the right wing allied with imperialism vs. the “people” and the Bolivarian government. This analysis is based, of course, on concrete aspects of the coordinates of the present conflict but leaves no space for understanding the tensions, differentiations, and contradictions internal to Chavismo as well as within the popular camp.

ML: There is a kind of artificial construction of a unity between government and people, as also occurred often in relation to Cuba, for example. That is, the Cuban people is one, and only one, and the one that speaks for the Cuban people is necessarily their government. As if there were no relations of domination and conflicts of interests in Cuban society. Between men and women, but also between state and society, or between Blacks, Mestizos and whites, or between countryside and city. From this perspective, which unifies government and people in a single symbolic bloc, nothing really emancipatory can arise. Finally, the challenge before us is reducing or overcoming these relations of domination, if I understand the task. In this dichotomous construction, polarization, war-like logics reappear, a cultural legacy that has been borne by the left since the Cold War, and that now in this historical moment has enabled us to avoid many of the things we need to learn. It is a legacy that was somewhat partially overcome by the ’68 revolt with its cultural impact on societies, but is now suffering a reactualization that I feel is quite distressing.

FG: Edgardo, on the military logic and the situation in Venezuela. How can an attempt be made to confront the Venezuelan crisis from below and from the left? Personally, I did not sign either of the international appeals, because I genuinely felt that neither responded at the time to the urgency of the situation, to the necessary denunciation of imperialist agression, the right wing and its openly coup-oriented sectors and, at the same time, on the other hand, was capable of issuing an open, clear critical analysis of the authoritarian drift of Madurismo; but away from not only the formal defense of the 1999 Constitution but also from the necessary recovery of the forms of popular power, the experiences of self-organization, the communal project that was still alive, notwithstanding everything, in the interstices of the process….

EL: Obviously, there has been a sustained offensive by the Empire, by the United States. From the beginning of the Chávez government there were attempts by the government of the United States to undermine this process for reasons that were both geopolitical and economic. We know that Venezuela’s oil reserves, and its gold, coltan, uranium and other abundant mineral reserves in the south of the country are essential for the United States, either for itself or to limit access to them for its global rivals. Since 1999, Venezuela has represented a point of entry for changes in the continent, and that is why the US also supported the 2002 military coup and the 2002-2003 business lock-out in the oil industry that paralyzed the country for two months, with the express intention to overthrow the government of President Chávez. We know that groups and parties of the Venezuelan far right have relied on permanent advice and funding from the State Department. The financial blockade and the explicit threats of armed intervention formulated by Trump can not in any way be taken lightly. There have also been important interventions by Uribism and Colombian paramilitarism. This type of aggression is part of the panorama of the current crisis in Venezuela, and no one from the left can avoid it or put it in the background.

Now the problem of the Bolivarian process is: What is it that we want to defend? and How should we defend it? Do we have to defend any government with a discourse confronting the United States? Or are we to defend a collective process of a democratic, anticapitalist and anti-imperialist nature that points to a horizon that responds to the profound civilizational crisis we are going through? Do we have to defend the increasingly authoritarian government of Maduro, or do we have to defend the transformative potential that emerged in 1999? Today, the preservation of power for the Maduro government, clientelism and the threats of cutting off access to subsidized basic goods (in conditions in which for a high percentage of the population this is the only way to have access to food) play a much more important role than the appeal to popular participation. And, in the background, a matter for debate is what do we understand today by the left? Can we think of the left without questioning what was socialism of the last century? When forces that sought to overcome bourgeois democracy ended up being authoritarian, vertical, totalitarian regimes. … Today, in Venezuela, we have to ask ourselves if we are moving in the direction of deepening democracy or if the doors to direct participation of people in the orientation of the country’s destiny are closing.

In Venezuela, in 1999 a Constituent Assembly (CA) was held with very high levels of participation, a referendum was organized to decide whether a CA was to be carried out, the constituent members were elected with high participation, the results were approved by a majority of 62% of the votes, enormous resources were spent to modernize the electoral system, establishing a totally digitized, transparent system with multiple control mechanisms, and audit. A reliable electoral system, virtually fraud-proof, as has been recognized by numerous international organizations and electoral experts around the world. But, in December 2015, the opposition wins the parliamentary elections with a large majority, and the government is faced with the dilemma of respecting these electoral results and remaining faithful to the constitution of 1999, or on the contrary, doing everything possible to remain in power, even if this meant ignoring the will of the majority of the population or sacrificing the electoral system that had conquered such high levels of legitimacy. It clearly opts to remain in power at all costs.

Step by step decisions are made that define an authoritarian drift. The holding of the recall referendum in 2016 is prevented, the election of governors in December that year is unconstitutionally postponed, the attributions of the National Assembly are not recognized and these are usurped between the Supreme Court of Justice and the Executive Power. As of February 2016, the President begins to govern by way of a state of emergency (“economic emergency”), expressly violating the conditions and time limits established in the Constitution of 1999. Assuming powers that under the Constitution are attributed to the sovereign people, Maduro issues a call for a National Constituent Assembly, and electoral mechanisms are defined to guarantee total control of that assembly. A monocolour National Constituent Assembly is elected, its 545 members are identified with the government. This assembly, once installed, proclaims itself supra-constitutional and plenipotentiary. Most of its decisions are adopted by acclamation or unanimously without any debate. Instead of addressing the task for which it was supposedly elected, the writing of a new draft Constitution, it begins to make decisions referring to all areas of public powers, dismisses officials, calls elections in conditions designed to prevent or make very difficult the participation of those who do not support the government. It approves what it calls constitutional laws, which in fact results in the abolition of the 1999 Constitution. They adopt retroactive laws, such as the decision to outlaw those parties that did not participate in the mayoral elections of December 2017. The participation of left-wing candidates different from those decided by the PSUV leadership is prevented. Meanwhile, the National Electoral Council fraudulently blocks the election of Andrés Velázquez as governor of Bolivar State. …

What is at stake here is not the formal defense of the Constitution of 1999, but the defense of democracy, not a formal bourgeois democracy, but the opening towards the deepening of democracy that the 1999 Constitution represented. Without any single milestone defining a clear break with the democratic constitutional order created in 1999, that democratic constitutional order has been sliced ​​up step by step, successively, like a salami, until we find ourselves in the current situation, which is no longer recognizable.

FG: Then, in light of this very complex panorama where progressives experience brusque or gradual setbacks, where the critical or radical lefts fail to emerge as a massive popular force, where the actually existing replacement electoral forces are, at the moment, aggressive neoliberal rightists, even insurrectional in some cases, such as Venezuela, how can we think of concrete alternatives in this end to the hegemony of progressivism and the rebound of a late neoliberalism? From the perspective of buen vivir and ecosocialism, from criticism to the limits and contradictions of progressive governments, from popular or decolonial feminism, how are we to imagine utopias with concrete perspectives for Our America?

EL: In Venezuela, the only source of optimism for me at this moment is the fact that the crisis has been so deep and has impacted the collective consciousness in such a way that it is possible that the charm of oil, of rentism and of the Magical State as beneficient provider is slowly beginning to dissipate. All the left-right political debate in recent decades has operated within the parameters of the oil imaginery, within this notion of Venezuela as a rich country, owner of the largest oil reserves on the planet. Politics have revolved around the demands that different sectors of society make on the state in order to access these resources.

I am starting to see signs, still lamentably weak, of an acknowledgment that it is not possible to continue on that path. There is the beginning of an acceptance that a historical cycle is drawing to an end. People are starting to scratch their heads, and now what? I have had relations for years with what is the most continuous and most vigorous process of popular organization in Venezuela, CECOSESOLA.[10] This is a network of cooperatives operating in several states in the center and west of the country that links a wide network of agricultural and artisanal producers with urban consumers, as well as a splendid cooperative health center and a funeral cooperative. I have been impressed by the presence of topics such as the recovery and exchange of seeds in everyday conversations. The recognition of a before and an after the beginning of the current crisis.

Recently, when someone in a farming community came down from a nearby town, he was told to remember to bring back a can of tomato seed. That was an every day occurrence. These were seeds of imported, selected and hybrid tomatoes that did not reproduce, that were not necessarily transgenic but they were sterile after the first sowing. With the economic crisis, that access to seeds is abruptly cut off. Ancestral peasant practices are resumed. They begin holding meetings between farmers in which it is asked, who has seeds of what? Indigenous seeds that were only preserved on a small scale begin to be exchanged – potato seeds, tomato seeds, etc. This opens up new possibilities. We are going to wake up from this dream (which turned out to be a nightmare) and think about the possibility that we are somewhere else, in another country, in other conditions and life goes on but now it is taking a new path.

FG: Miriam, what Edgardo says is interesting but he describes, for the moment, very small embryos of popular power, which may seem inoperative in the face of immense regional challenges, financial globalization, world chaos. …

ML: Of course, that is, it depends a little from where you are looking at it. I think that here, for example, in Europe, what we have to do is start to become aware of the effects that the intensive consumption lifestyle, which everyone assumes is completely natural, cause in other parts of the world. It seems to me that the scale of destruction that this causes, not only in environmental terms but also in the social fabric, of subjectivities, is much more important than what is assumed in Europe, where it all remains practically invisible, camouflaged by consumer environments that are pleasant and anaesthetizing.

EL: Or the belief that the standard of living of the North does not depend on extractivism in the South.

ML: Some of us call this the imperial way of life, which automatically assumes that the natural resources and cheap or enslaved labour of the whole world are for the wealthiest 20 percent of the world population who live in the capitalist centers or the middle and upper classes of the peripheral societies. And if it’s cheap, that’s good. It provides a sensation that the planet is going to collapse ecologically and socially because of the enormous quantity of gadgets that are produced, which nobody really needs except “the markets” for everything that capitalism suggests as artificially constructed needs. So, here in the capitalist centers there is a very important task of reducing the amount of material and energy that is expended. For example, the movements around degrowth have a good perspective in terms of cultural transformation, where because of the discomforts with neoliberalism that you mentioned before, people rediscover other non-material dimensions of the quality of life, and also the wealth of self-production of clothes, or honey, or other things.

FG: Yes, here in France too, there are currently a lot of alternative rural networks, collective self-managed experiences, areas to defend (ZAD), alternative currencies, etc. but they are still very small.

ML: Of course, they are small networks for now, but the important thing is to transmit to more people these imaginaries of different kinds of well-being, so that the change is made not by force, or not by the crisis, but by the desire itself. So that people can feel, experience in their own flesh that there are other dimensions of the good life that can easily compensate for having less materially, and that a decrease does not have to be experienced as a loss.

EL: Nor as a sacrifice to stop having things. …

FG: In fact, here, there is more and more talk about the necessary conquest of a cheerful sobriety and voluntary austerity in the face of consumer waste. It is an interesting, powerful concept that can be connected to buen vivir and ecosocialism.

ML: I feel every time I go to Europe that there is a lot of discomfort with this super-accelerated lifestyle that prevails here. I have many friends who get sick, if not physically, they get sick psychologically, from stress, depression, burnouts, panic attacks. The dimensions that this acquires are hidden quite systematically in the dominant discourses that continue to associate wellbeing with economic growth, and much more so in what is perceived from the global South. Seen from Latin America, here in the central countries, everything is necessarily a wonder. Then, to visualize these discomforts and make visible the other forms of life that already result from them, would be an important step. Because in the South, curiously, everyone believes that it is better to live in the city, while in Germany or Spain, on the contrary, there is an increase in the numbers of ecological communities that go to the countryside. In other words, it would be a step to help break this hegemony of imitative development, which forces the South to repeat all the mistakes that have already been made in Northern societies, such as clogging cities with cars, for example. But some of these errors, as in the division of labor between men and women here in the North, are being overcome also by the new generations, Now, from my generation on down, it has become more normal to share the tasks of care not only in the couple but beyond the couple, perhaps in the building, in the community where a reduced space for coexistence, can be generated.

This is also another important element, building community against forced individualization, both in the countryside and in the city. I do not mean the community understood as the small ancestral peasant village, fixed in time, but political communities in movement, which incorporate their tasks of care as collective tasks and then reorganize life around what life reproduces, and not around what the market or capital demands. And I think we should make visible all the efforts that are already being made in this sense, where people live relatively well, both in the North and in the South. In the South, in part, they will be ancestral communities, but there are also new ones, while in the North they are usually newly constituted. It’s about changing monolithic thinking and looking at the things that exist, you do not have to invent everything from scratch.

For example, there is a view that urban suburbs are hell, in the global South above all. But if you are going to look closer, there are many logics there that are absolutely anti-capitalist, the logic of not working, of giving priority to fiestas, of exchanges not mediated by the logic of money. … Maybe it’s not the model. Anyway, there is no model and there should not be, that is very important to emphasize. We are not, after 20th century socialism, going to have a new unique recipe which we will all enroll in and follow, but rather it is a question of allowing that diversity of alternatives, so that they can be built from each culture and context, from the people who are involved in them. Buenos vivires in the plural.

We also have to generate a culture of alternatives that allows us to err, to make mistakes, to learn from mistakes. These spaces of social experimentation in which we say good we are going to try that, it does not work, we are going to try something else, but in cohesion and without competing, according to the principle of cooperation and not competition. A book called The Future of Development[11] states that the percentage of the world population actually inserted in the circuits of the neoliberal globalized market is barely half, and that the rest is still in what we would call the margins. That provides hope, it also means that half the world population is in something else, beyond the dominant model, so we should start looking around.

]]>https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2018/03/12/latin-america-how-the-commons-creates-alternatives-to-neoliberalism-and-the-vanguard-left/feed/16461Summer of Commoning: A Tour of French Communities and Projectshttps://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2018/01/06/summer-of-commoning-a-tour-of-french-communities-and-projects/
https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2018/01/06/summer-of-commoning-a-tour-of-french-communities-and-projects/#respondSat, 06 Jan 2018 17:32:41 +0000https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/?p=6364During the summer of 2017 the P2P Foundation's Maïa Dereva travelled throughout France. Now she shares the stories of the commons she met along the way, never knowing what she would find in advance.

Translated by Maïa Dereva, edited by Ann Marie Utratel

During the summer of 2017, I travelled throughout France. Now I am sharing the stories of the commons I met along the way, never knowing what I would find in advance. These articles were originally published in French here:Commons Tour 2017.

“La Fonderie”: 30 years of successful participatory housing

When I left the metro station in Vanves, south of Paris, I discovered a pretty, modern and flowery city. Just a few steps from the station, I found the porch I had been told to look for, and crossed beneath it to find the participative habitat where I would spend a week. It was a large building, nestled between the wall of the cemetery and the surrounding houses, wrapped around a tree-lined garden. Suzanne, a young retired woman, welcomed me and gave me a tour of the property.

La Fonderie is a project begun in 1984. This building was first a factory, bought by a developer forced to buy it as part of a lot, but who didn’t know what to do with it. He was delighted when the families (first 3, soon 10) offered to buy it so they could do some work and make their participatory housing project a reality.

From the beginning, the habitat was intended to save energy and be environmentally friendly, but the craftsmen capable of building a wooden frame building (more than just soundproofing) were not legion at that time. The group agreed to a compromise: the building would be made of concrete with a wooden frame, and a very nice wooden façade would be added. It was no easy task, as the building was completely twisted and the carpenter in charge of its cladding almost threw in the towel several times! All of the residents had to persuade and encourage him to finish.

After two years of work, the building finally emerged: 9 apartments from 70m² to 120m² in various shapes; a common room; two shared guest rooms; a workshop and a shared cellar; as well as a garden equipped with a compost. The only thing young couples completely overlooked at the time was the issue of aging. There are stairs everywhere. Nothing was planned to make life easier for people with reduced mobility, so it’s a question of adding an elevator in the column provided by the architect, but it wouldn’t solve the problem for apartments that are almost all duplex or triplex.

The truth is that when the project was started, the inhabitants were not planning to be doing this 30 years later! This is a particularly exemplary experience because, after all this time, the same families (with one exception) remained in the area. Of course, the fifteen or so children who grew up there have now moved away, but the original couples are there and continue to operate the common parts of the place – for example, welcoming people like me, or opening the meeting room.

What is the secret of such longevity? First, a fairly strong convergence of values eg., ecology, anti-liberalism (or, anti-neoliberalism) and practices. Most of the inhabitants of La Fonderie are also involved in local associations like the local newspaper, environmental film festival, cyclists’ association, etc. They took part in the creation of the first AMAP (community-supported agriculture) in Vanves, opening their collective compost to the inhabitants of the district. In short, they are people who are comfortable with community life and citizen involvement.

The second secret is that community life is governed by clear rules, based on unanimity. At first, there was a monthly meeting (sometimes more) to discuss all subjects. In time, the unwritten rules of common life were integrated by everyone. Today, a single annual meeting is enough to solve a number of unusual questions. Things also happen informally: in the corridors, the garden, or during the many shared meals. There’s also a whiteboard outside for “on-duty” messages.

Conflicts? Of course there were some. But they all got settled, the most effective method being… time. Today, most of the inhabitants of the place are retired, and are not always present in the building. The question of community sustainability arises. What will happen to the place? Will it be sold gradually to the highest bidder in a context where the PLU jumped 30%? Suzanne is confident that “We won’t all leave at the same time,” she explains. “It’s also possible that we can gradually integrate new inhabitants seduced by our way of life, acclimatize them and pass on our traditions.”

Mainstenant and the pirate island

The extraordinary thing about nomadism is that it lets me discover people and places whose existence I could never have suspected! On the recommendation of a commoner friend, I found myself one day with my little suitcase-on-wheels at the Paris Saint Lazare station; I took a suburban train and 25 minutes later disembarked in another dimension…

After a good fifteen minutes of walking, I reached a barely noticed dock and before long, a small boat approached and I boarded for a trip to the opposite side of the river. I had arrived on the island of Platais! Here, Laurence came to greet me, and guided me through a maze of small green pathways.

Laurence, a researcher at the university, is part of Mainstenant, a group of about fifty people who set out to revive abandoned places, villages and buildings – not only for leisure or work, but also to settle permanently and live with their families. And among the places they discovered, there is this extraordinary island.

It is, in large part, inhabited, sometimes year-round but most often in the summer. There are lots of cottages, large and small, made of fibre cement or wood. This place looks like a giant campsite whose tents and caravans would fall down eventually. As you stroll along the narrow roads, it’s almost like “The Village” in the Prisoner series.

But the most surprising thing was yet to come. A whole part of the island is indeed uninhabited, abandoned after a period of glory now past. Accompanied by Adrien, Nicolas, and a whole bunch of explorers of all ages, I crouched in the grass beside an old disused swimming pool worthy of a cinema set.

My hosts were obviously at home in this ruin! They brought me around the property with a big smile, happy to show me the empty cabins, the old piano, the graffiti (more creative than many others), the tiled terrace giving onto a splendid panorama, the vestiges of an unlikely miniature golf re-colonized by nature…

Then we pushed a little further on, between the trees and the nettles, and settled down on a hidden beach. While the children laughed at each other in the muddy waters of the Seine, the adults took care to calmly pick up potentially harmful objects: rusty rims, pieces of glass, plastic and scrap metal…all the rubbish from civilization landed on the shores of this magical island.

When the sun set, we went to the association’s chalet to prepare the evening meal together around the wood fire. And while the humidity was already starting to invade the lawn, we happily settled around a large tablecloth, just below the pirate flag that proudly floats on the garden fence.

For a city girl like me, this getaway was a real life lesson. It reassures me that people can explore and invest in abandoned places in order to open up spaces of possibilities. I really felt that what they do, they do for us as human beings who are completely disconnected from their needs and from nature, left so vulnerable to the challenges that lie ahead.

The Assembly of the Commons of Grenoble: building the city together

It was with great pleasure that I met Anne-Sophie and Antoine during my journey, while taking a break in the beautiful city of Grenoble. We happily shared the practices of the Lille and Grenoble assemblies of the commons over a coffee at a sidewalk cafe.

Anne-Sophie and Antoine were both elected to positions in city hall. They shared stories with me of citizens engaged in a dynamic of counterpower and, after being elected in 2014, of their difficulty in taking on an institutional posture. Changing culture is not always easy! But this is what also makes the Grenoble Assembly of the Commons so special, born of the meeting of two dynamics.

The first of these two comes from Nuit Debout, within which a “Commission of the Commons” was created in 2016. The idea was to discuss the management of commons as a common responsibility: not only the responsibility of public authorities, but also of the area’s inhabitants.

The second dynamic, on the part of city hall, was the philosophically interesting idea of investing in a space between the private and the public, to make room for citizens in the public debate. The key here is that this idea has not been abandoned at all, in fact it unites activists and elected representatives in the same assembly today.

What the elected representatives underline is that even if they have the will to make a difference in the direction of greater citizen involvement in public life, it is not so simple. Legislation is not adapted at all, particularly with regard to risk management (the insurance framework does not exist). On top of that, officials are not so aware, and not trained to work directly with citizens. Faced with this, the elected representatives asked the services to work on these points and advance the texts and practices.

Nevertheless, among the completed projects at the town hall level, there have been agreements created for occupying public spaces such as shared gardens, for example. The assembly also discussed the idea of writing a charter on housing, a bit like in Bologna (Italy), where a charter of urban commons was drafted and signed by some forty Italian cities.

The city also participates in a “migrants’ platform” to accompany reception initiatives.There are also participatory budgets: every year, 800K€ in investment is opened to citizens’ projects. 106 projects proposed by the Grenoble region were selected in 2017. On the cultural side, we can cite the desire to take art out of museums with the Street Art Festival, whose traces can be found all over the city walls.

To date, the Assembly of the Commons has set up four separate working groups which meet asynchronously at regular intervals:

Natural Commons

Knowledge Commons

Urban Commons

Commons of Health and Well-being

The spirit of commons in Grenoble has a long history. After the Second World War, unlike many other places, the city had, for quite a while, retained its own operators to manage electricity and water, which made it a very special case.

After being privatized in the 1980s, water came back into the public domain after a citizens’ lengthy legal battle with certain elected environmental officials and some employees of the water authority. This was the first battle won in France for water municipalization, along with the first French users’ committee to make the citizens’ involvement in water management last. The whole world visits Grenoble for its water management model. And on the electricity and gas side, the operator is a mixed-economy company but the public (the city of Grenoble) is still the majority shareholder.

This civic expertise and spirit of solidarity continue today, and are embodied in the city’s desire to be part of a concrete, lasting relationship between two communities that “do with others”, all the others…

The Assembly of the Commons of Marseille: a prefiguration full of promise

This new postcard will be sunny! If there is one characteristic peculiar to Marseille, it is its light. This is what I discovered by spending a few days there on the invitation of Pierre-Alain, a commoner with whom I had already communicated on the theme of the assemblies of the commons. That’s how I had the chance to participate in the very first commoner meeting of that region.

To get off to a good start, we began with a nice little restaurant on the Vieux Port, of course

It was an opportunity to get acquainted with about ten participants, and discover the diversity of their profiles and respective projects, from the association leader to the lawyer, through the researcher, the doctoral student and the company managers – the table looked like my idea of an assembly of the commons: a joyful mix of heterogeneous careers.

We then joined the MarsMedialab, a magnificent third space of 350m² in the heart of the city, to start the work session proper. The objective was very simple: to bring together the good will of the regions around the question of the commons. The problem was clear: what do we do with this goodwill? What kind of actions can this group implement? What structure should it have?

In addition to the people, the roundtable allowed us to (re)discover a number of emblematic national and local commons and initiatives such as:

SavoirsCom1, a collective committed to the development of policies and initiatives related to knowledge commons;

Ars Industrialis, a cultural association created by Bernard Stiegler, whose only regional branch is located in Marseille;

L’Office, a structure that accompanies the cultural, social, educational and economic transitions from a “digital society” to a “communal society”;

H2H, a software platform that supports the projects of the Hôtel du Nord residents’ cooperative;

ManuFabrik, a cooperative which is part of the field of popular education;

Pas Sans Nous (Not Without Us), an association that has given itself the role of being a union of working class neighbourhoods.

The exchanges were rich and very engaging. Those present were committed to making concrete progress in the local commons. But for a first meeting it was important, before discussing specific projects, to share a common vision of the group’s organization and the methodologies to be adopted to work together.

With this in mind, I shared the practices of the Assembly of the Commons of Lille, in particular the governance model that we have adopted in our collective which has been working very well for the past two years, stigmergy. With the support of Pierre-Alain, who is already convinced, I was careful to stress the importance of documenting practices to facilitate the inclusion of newcomers and promote transparency in processes.

During the afternoon, the specificity of Marseille’s dynamic appeared to me in two ways:

First, it seemed quite clear that there were two fairly distinct movements. On the one hand, the needs related to what could resemble an Assembly of the Commons: mapping the commons, creating a network, and on the other hand, very pressing and concrete questions concerning the establishment of an economy of the commons, which would be more like a Chamber of Commons structure.

Second, since the region is vast, it seemed obvious that at least two major geographical poles were emerging: a group centred on Marseille and its surroundings, and another anchored on the side of Sophia Antipolis.

What also emerged from these exchanges was that each of them was already well engaged in their own projects, so time was inevitably limited to invest in a new collective, which would make the assembly a form of “hub”, a chamber echoing each other’s initiatives. But the willingness to get to know each other and to create a true community by working together on concrete initiatives was palpable.

To sum up, after the meeting with the Grenoble commoners, this Marseilles exchange convinced me that the assemblies of the commons are very unique places of co-creation, in which we must not try to apply a centralized theoretical model, but welcome the contributory impulses in a dynamic anchored locally and respectful of the geographical and historical specificities of each location.

“Les Ateliers” in Castres: from dream to reality

If there’s one common that I want to present to you, it’s this one! I was fortunate enough to be able to attend its conception, so it’s moving to see, a few years later, that the baby has grown up well and is working like a charm.

What is it all about? The “Les Ateliers” cluster, located in Castres in Tarn, is a place dedicated to the development of sustainable economy. It is almost 4000m², located just a stone’s throw from the city centre, fitted out to accommodate a whole lot of projects in connection with the Social and Solidarity Economy (ESS): a shop of local producers, a restaurant that buys from them, a recycling plant, a coworking area, offices and spaces for rent, etc.

Barely a year after its opening, it looks like this place has been part of the landscape for ages. However, it took time, energy, creativity and the concerted actions of an entire collective to make it happen.

The story begins in the late 1990s. Pierre has been an entrepreneur and head of the family textile business for 20 years, inherited from his father and grandfather. Over the years, he contributed to the company’s growth from 40 to 250 employees. Then suddenly, the European borders opened up, especially to the Chinese market. It didn’t take long for customers, seduced by half-price deals, to desert them and for the banks to let go of the company. By the end of 2008, its fate was sealed: first liquidation and then dismissals. “Humanly, it happened with a lot of respect, no one was responsible for the situation, but it was very hard for everyone” Pierre says.

Once unemployed, the entrepreneur, long interested in the operation of cooperatives and looking for a way to reinvent, started a Master’s degree in Social and Solidarity Economics at the University of Toulouse. As part of his training, he was asked to present a project. It was then that he imagined this pillar…

It turns out that the building dedicated to the logistics of his former business had miraculously escaped liquidation thanks to a tenant who had come to set up shop one month before the auction! Of course, you had to have some imagination at that time to think that the place could accommodate something other than shelves of abandoned lockers. I visited the place when it was still an industrial wasteland, I can tell you that it was very impressive and sad to walk the long empty hallways lit by pale neon lights, and the sheds haunted by mannequins.

In Pierre’s mind, things were very clear: this project would be collective, or it would not be. As of August 2011, the dynamics took shape in the form of an association, with the participation of Regate and Regabat (two cooperatives for activity and employment of the territory), the IES (a regional cooperative for solidarity financing), and the CRESS (regional chamber of the social and solidarity economy).

The first project presentation meeting in October 2011 gathered some 50 interested parties. Since the family tradition had not disappeared with the company, Jean, Pierre’s son, started the feasibility study with a small 6-month contract financed by the European Union. Things moved along relatively quickly, given the scale of the project:

2012/13: Etic, the real estate company, which creates, finances and manages office and retail spaces dedicated to social change actors, becomes a partner and finances the project;

2013/14: Selected by LaboESS as the model project for the “Territorial Pillar of Economic Cooperation” (PTCE), alongside 23 other projects; and the building permit is submitted;

2016: the building is completely renovated, the residents settle in, and the various projects open one by one: the restaurant, the shop of producers, the textile shop, and so on.

The association then transformed into a SCIC (Cooperative society of collective interest), with 2 co-managers, about 50 partners (individuals and structures), 11 employees and one person performing civic service. SCIC governance operates on the principle of “1 person = 1 vote”. “There is also room for communities, but there are no volunteers at the moment” says Pierre.

If I wanted to present this project to you, of course it is because I was personally involved in its start-up, and the energy deployed by Pierre, Jean and the collective impressed me very much. But it is also because today, Les Ateliers seems to me to be an exemplary achievement of “commons”, or rather, several interlocking commons.

In terms of buildings, the property owner Etic now owns the place, ensuring the project’s longevity. In the cooperative, the functioning of governance allows everyone to become involved and feel that they are part of the initiatives. Even within the structure, freelancers installed in the co-working space have recently decided to meet under the brand name “Les Ateliers de la Com” to answer calls for bids together.

Of course, there are experiments at all levels, so everything is not without risk and decisions change with experience. Although profitable activities partially fund activities that do not finance themselves, the economic model is still seeking to be refined. Many services are and have been provided free of charge. At this level, the cooperative seeks to develop partnerships with institutions in order to be supported by demonstrating the impact and interest of the project for the territory.

As for the general spirit, Pierre said it best: “After 20 years of classical entrepreneurship, I discovered another approach. In the SSE community, these are not the same human relationships. For example, ethical funders are listening to us and looking for solutions with us. I have always tried to have this state of mind in my company, and my desire to show that you can do things differently has come true. The big difference, as an entrepreneur, is that I felt supported by the partners and surrounded by the collective. Employees are partners, and everyone is motivated to move the project forward.”

And now, with great serenity, Pierre has just retired…even if he doesn’t rule out lending a helping hand from time to time

]]>https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2018/01/06/summer-of-commoning-a-tour-of-french-communities-and-projects/feed/06364Science as Public Good and Commons as a Sciencehttps://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2016/02/11/science-as-public-good-and-commons-as-a-science/
https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2016/02/11/science-as-public-good-and-commons-as-a-science/#respondThu, 11 Feb 2016 08:03:09 +0000https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/?p=6288We must sign the peace treaty: we need a lasting agreement that doesn't insist upon dividing the world between those who know and those who don’t; an armistice to liberate the world from the arrogance of experts.

A discussion on the interweavings of science with commons, public and private and the ways we understand, produce and socialize it. By Antonio Lafuente and Adolfo Estalella, from the Instituto de Historia (CSIC) and the University of Manchester.

Traslated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratel

Proclaiming the public nature of science has become something as commonplace as it is controversial. At times, the consensus is overwhelming: more science and more research funding are universally in demand, taking it as given that science is not only economically necessary but also morally irreplaceable. However, the agreement was never absolute. There have always been those who are willing to blame a democratic deficit for so little discussion on the type of science we want, or for the fact that we still treat the environmental and health damages produced by the deployment of techno-science as externalities. The truth is that science isn’t only public, it’s also private, and the crossbreeding between academia, government and business is old, deep, and sometimes murky.

Science isn’t only semi-public: it couldn’t survive without the publics [a]. There is an extensive body of work that insists upon the social, urban, and collective nature of science. Within it we are shown how science has always maintained a complex, vibrant and dynamic relationship with the people: amateurs and artisans, witnesses and spectators, activists and consumers. Yes, it’s true that, for better or worse, the citizenry owes a lot to science; equally correct is the thesis that science owes much to the citizenry. A lot of what contributes to the knowledge we find so hard to accept is anonymous, invisible and tacit; our narratives insist upon scorning that knowledge. Consequently, it seems as if the entire world is complicit in creating this absurd and biased image of science.

To build our argument, we’ve divided this text into three parts. In the first we’ll explore the historical origins of science’s capacity as a public good. In the second we will highlight the problems derived from treating Commons science and open science as analogous, which is to say that the exigencies of the open access or open data movements, while necessary, are not sufficient. The third section argues that the condition of being a common good comes not from its being provided for all, but rather stems from being created among all. This opens the capacity of being a common good by virtue of belonging to a third sector, alongside the public and the private.

The truth is that science isn’t only public, it’s also private, and the crossbreeding between academia, government and business is old, deep, and sometimes murky. For decades, perhaps centuries, we’ve told the history of science as if it were akin to the planetary expansion of an oil stain, or the transmission of an epidemic. But there is nothing natural about the transmission of knowledge.

Science understood as a commons would not then be simply a public science seeking an outlet via open access, nor would it be an extramural non-commercialized science, or a formal science (as always) including the citizenry in the design and evaluation of projects and results. Science understood as a commons wouldn’t be the same old science in a democratic or post-modernist guise. Science doesn’t become a commons by being more functional, open or militant; instead it results from the application of contrasted, collective and recursive epistemic practices. The Commons would then be another approach, historically distinguished for producing knowledge, community, and commitment. Thus, in the third part, rather than discussing science as a commons, we will discuss the Commons as a science.

Science Commons as a Public Good

The notion of science being a public good is relatively recent. Philip Mirowski (2011) has devoted much effort to explaining this idea. In order to understand it, we must unavoidably admit that the pressures imposed upon scientists by the Church, Empires, and States bear a striking resemblance to those which today’s industrial corporations seek to impose. We know that by the 19th-century, university laboratories were being scrupulously combed by industrialists probing between test tubes and coils for some discovery upon which new monopolies could be built. It all seems to point to the communitarian nature of science earning credit by somehow finding ways to legitimize corporate-financed industrial laboratories claiming discoveries as their own. In this way, if the discovery was assumed to be collective, no one except the owner of the space where the knowledge was produced could claim the patent.

The Second World War drastically changed this panorama. During the second third of the 20th century, the state gave itself the right to manage science and create the necessary conditions for advancing innovation. The war economy brought about a techno-military complex where the public sector invested in basic sciences, in order to guarantee the free circulation of knowledge among entrepreneurs playing a game whose rules, fixed by the Army, served the national interest. Its condition as public goods meant the militarization and nationalization of so-called Big Science. Everything changed in a hurry from the 1980s on, creating conditions which were favorable for launching an accelerated process of knowledge privatization. Not just inventions but discoveries could be subjected to intellectual property rights and, consequently, be treated as assets circulating in the stock exchange to attract venture capital. In this new regime of academic capitalism the boundaries between the public and the private dissolve.

The transition, however, wasn’t without resistance. What by now is obvious to all was only anticipated by some, and their arguments are still relevant. Paul A. David (2008) explains how, since the dawn of modern science, a perception emerged of scientists as unmanageable people, owing to the sophisticated nature of their knowledge. The truth is that the court, given that nobody could act as a counterweight, elected to open knowledge so that they themselves could preside over the quality of scientific work. This would be the origin of the awards, academia, and the periodic journals. The autonomy of science imbued its organization with the qualities of a meritocratic, open and cosmopolitan enterprise. Distinguishing between sages and charlatans required the concurrence of new spaces, different actors and different mediations that, as a whole, lead us to treat what is known as the Scientific Revolution not as an epistemic revolution but as an open science revolution. Michael Polanyi also wanted to join the club of those who opposed the treatment of knowledge as information to eventually, after disenfranchising it from its places of production, turn it into a profitable resource. The commodification of science is impossible when the only knowledge that can be patented is non-tacit. The aforementioned positions argue that science only prospers when it is kept as a collective enterprise whose products are not reduced to codified information, and whose organization won’t overwhelm the attempts to confine it within a protected environment. The history of ideas, the anthropology of organizations and the economy of innovation coincided in the necessity of demanding an active role from the state in the preservation of science as public goods. And this is the tradition assumed and inherited by Michel Callon (1994) in his provocative vision of science.

Callon’s reasoning begins by obliging his readers to accept that knowledge was always the most mundane of enterprises, never isolated from the surrounding interests. To say otherwise was tantamount to ignoring the ample work previously undertaken in the field of the study of science. For decades, perhaps centuries, we’ve told the history of science as if it were akin to the planetary expansion of an oil stain, or the transmission of an epidemic. But there is nothing natural about the transmission of knowledge. What STS has taught us is that verifying any natural law or testing the relevance of a scientific concept necessitates a plethora of machines, technicians and reagents, as well as the time and resources to produce, select, contrast, discuss, standardize and communicate the results. As such, the desire to have science as a commons is a utopian undertaking which obliges us to examine whether we can truly assume the potentially untenable cost of transmission.

We must sign the peace treaty: we need a lasting agreement that doesn’t insist upon dividing the world between those who know and those who don’t; an armistice to liberate the world from the arrogance of experts. Stating that we need science to guarantee a prosperous future is a message that is as certain as it is exhausted. Moreover, it is the carrier of a plan that legitimizes exclusion while guaranteeing new wars for science.

Michel Callon has shown us that a robust science should promote the necessary Freedom of Association to operate different forms of organization; he also calls for a Freedom of Extension to prevent the network from allowing the obstruction or imposition of any type of orthodoxy or canon. Finally, it invites all participants to a Struggle against Irreversibility to prevent monopolies from creating standards that block innovation. The notion of public goods is explicitly related to the notion of diversity and not of open access. The importance lies not in the equitable distribution of knowledge, but rather in creating conditions that prevent interruptions in the process of knowledge production and diversification. The resource in need of protection isn’t knowledge itself, but the plurality of forms of socialization it facilitates. We don’t need the state to protect knowledge itself, but the networks it circulates within. It isn’t about protecting ideas that are published or deserve a Nobel Prize, but the infrastructures supporting them, which are often as inscrutable as they are contrary to the Commons.

Science Commons as Open Science

Imagining science as a commons requires that we stop thinking of it as something separable from the market. We also have to disentail the aforementioned claim from notions of open access. Elinor Ostrom (1990) argued for this with memorable aplomb: there is nothing more contrary to the Commons that an open access system absent any form of governance. Confusing both concepts is in fact what led Garrett Hardin to proclaim the tragedy of the Commons and to demand, as a survival strategy, the public or private patrimonial appropriation of those resources that really matter. The Commons, Ostrom remarked, are not a thing, but a management process that collapses when the community that sustains and is sustained by them doesn’t incorporate efficient rules to protect itself from, among other threats, free riders.

Over the last decade we’ve witnessed the birth of various movements which demand that science be awarded the condition of open enterprise. Though not all of their proponents use the same arguments, nor emphasize the same concepts, it seems reasonable to mention two central sets of motivations. On the one hand, there are those who question the generalized practice of externalizing the process of communication. They all share the critique of the current system as both profligate and paradoxical, as it assumes huge expenses to produce papers that we are later obliged to buy back from those who’d previously received them from us gratis.

The second motivation for demanding open access to scientific information has to do with the desideratum for well-informed politics, belief in free choice, and the strengthening of democracy. Debates on energy options, consumption of GMOs, air quality, food labeling, and the treatment of chronic diseases prompt processes that should be discussed openly. No less important is the fact that the exaggerated costs of scientific information or pharmaceuticals exclude poor institutions and countries from their use. This adds science to the list of factors contributing to the widening inequalities in the world.

Extravagance, careerism, and opacity are justified criticisms that validate an orientation towards open access. The quality of our democracies and global justice are neither minor, nor likely deferrable, objectives. But it’s an absolutely insufficient debate. While the politics of open science do correct some of the most heinous shortcomings of the current system, it is no less true that open, online and free distribution requires a set of conditions that, ultimately, benefit big corporations foremost – or, in other words, those able to capitalize on the information. Furthermore, it’s not clear that accessibility corrects the role of science in our world in any decisive way. Making the information freely available is not tantamount to being able to use or do something with it, as it will remain invariably tied to the technologies and values through which it was produced.

Those who’ve studied open science invite us to consider cases such as SETI [1] or all the crowd-sourced projects related to the pioneering BOINC [2] platform. Voluntary computation has shown itself to be a powerful mechanism for solving problems that demand enormous calculating capacity. Wikipedia and Fold.it [3] are two very different projects that authoritatively demonstrate the emergent power available to interconnected multitudes. We are speaking of colossal mechanisms connecting millions of humans; we’re also referring to new ways of producing and validating knowledge. Examples that allow us to imagine an empowered citizenry capable of producing facts to counter official data do exist. We could be talking about environmental or food crises, or the production of new cartographies, different patterns, or different institutions. If that were the case, we would witness the birth of different systems of knowledge gestated through pioneering forms of coding, communicating, archiving, and validating the knowledge. Laboratory space, formerly reserved for experts, is turning into disputed territory. The experts have good reason to feel uneasy. It all indicates that their consolidated hegemony could be in danger. It wouldn’t be the first time that the needs of the disgruntled have provoked a broadening of the space where knowledge resides, including new agents and different questions. We must sign the peace treaty: we need a lasting agreement that doesn’t insist upon dividing the world between those who know and those who don’t, an armistice to liberate the world from the arrogance of experts. Stating that we need science to guarantee a prosperous future is a message that is as certain as it is exhausted. Moreover, it is the carrier of a plan that legitimizes exclusion while guaranteeing new wars for science.

If we had to put the term “citizen science” on the scale, we would have to acknowledge that it tips more heavily toward science, despite extending beyond academia. Effectively, citizen science is independent science, knowledge developed by virtuous communities who, radical in their political rhetoric, are more conservative than we imagine in scientific practice. But citizen science isn’t monolithic and we could stand to evoke that diversity in the plural. All the citizen sciences share a resistentialist gesture. Some have also highlighted the existence of alternative means of relating to political, economic, scientific and environmental realities. Having reached this point, it’s imperative to mention hacker culture. The truth is, we owe much to Pekka Himannen and his notion of hacker ethics as the expression of technological non-conformism, negating the idea that things can only be that for which they were designed. But the most radical of hacker gestures, as shown by McKenzie Wark, not only implies a questioning of functionalities but also a confrontation with their properties. Hacking the world, beyond the invention of new possibilities for inhabiting and transforming it, could return to the Commons all that has been abusively relegated to state and market patrimony. The first hackers, from the 60s onwards, invented the squaring of the circle: to be an author doesn’t demand that you be a proprietor. Achieving the condition of author happens the moment the author gives away the thing that was authored. Thus, accreditation functions as an admirable way of opening knowledge.

Commons as a Science

None have been as radical in their approaches as the hacker movement. No one has managed to attain a better set of practical and sustainable protocols for a culture that is open, experimental, inalienable, horizontal and distributed. Moreover, as an abstract culture adept at generating new futures and imbued with a curiosity that generates hope, hacker culture has made its mark on other domains. It is no longer restricted to geeks, nor is it the domain of maladapted computer scientists. Nowadays we talk of hacking museums, academia and the city. We have hundreds of projects daring to examine the arts as ventures to be reformed according to non-mercantile principles, fighting to rescue music, painting or architecture from the clutches of the culture, tourism, or housing speculation industries. The city itself, its squares and abandoned lots, can be inhabited in other ways. From 2011 on, the Occupy movement has been the most visible manifestation of something that has been going on for decades all over the world. The city has been occupied, it must be occupied [b]; we must wrest it away from the entertainment, security and housing corporations (Harvey 2012). This is the origin of the open source urbanism that looks to and is inspired by free software hackers.

There is no city where citizens aren’t gathering in the squares and open lots; where, fed up with bowing to the ideal of individual consumerism, people aren’t stretching themselves a bit and getting reacquainted with the pleasures of group dances, sharing food, holding bazaars, fairs and other kinds of popular festivals. They’d almost convinced us that we’d do well to forget the old ways of socializing, to toss them out as old-fashioned and fossilized. However, now we see these things as our cultural patrimony, bringing out the best in us; that is to say, what we share and create among ourselves. This new urbanism is not new construction, but rather new relationships to one another experienced through material intervention in our own city. Madrid is an example of what we’re talking about right now in the second decade of our new century, but we also see it in Berlin, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Cape Town and Mumbai. A city re-urbanization shooting up from the abandoned lots, urban gardens, collective bike routes, self-guided walking tours, neighbourhood assemblies, local markets, rescued festivals, recovered collective memory, and finally, in the thousand and one ways of redesigning the city and gathering where our common links are weakest, most sporadic, tentative, intermittent – yet still apparent and solid, in place and functional (Corsín Jiménez 2014).

People are learning to experience and experiment with their city in new ways, with or without architects, with or without designers, with or without anthropologists. The experiment has been granted new life beyond the confines of the lab, setting in motion a process where the places, parties and infrastructures needed to turn the city into both an object and a place for experimentation are being re-imagined. There’s no scarcity of the credentialed in many of these projects, but theirs is not an expert role, recognizing themselves as part of a collective experiment to problematize established forms of authority. They all feel the importance of these communities of learning. Everyone experiments, everyone investigates, everyone interprets, everyone contrasts, everyone consents, everyone learns and everyone creates new knowledge: a commons science, to create a city of the Commons.

It’s not hard to find references from hacker culture in these projects, as they often invoke the free software community as a source of inspiration. In them, we find some of the characteristics that make free software a singular mode of production, knowledge, and sociability, among them rapid prototyping, recursive in its organization and granular in the distribution of its efforts (Kelty 2008). Rapid prototyping means that designs, objects and proposals are circulated before they are even finished. This is a vulnerable and precarious state of affairs that, nonetheless, compels others to partake in an effort that aspires to be collective. In this way, the widening of the design object is paralleled by the growth of the community surrounding it. But this ongoing beta state also allows for forking at any stage, the possibility of opting for another alternative, and separating from the dominant criteria. Free software, then, is always open to all its potential, always functions as a beta design, a prototype manifested in a non-niche community, a project that is always more than many and less than one.

The community both serves and is created by this cognitive activity. Let’s summarize its nature: experimental, open, relational, distributed, horizontal, collaborative, inalienable and recursive. As conversationalists, they are producing a relational body based on the experiential, in all that the academic laboratory qualifies as collateral, irrelevant or useless. It’s the same experience we’ve previously described when referring to urbanism.

Projects that learn from their errors are recursive, something that children do systematically and which, at times, also lies within the reach of adults. But in this context, our interest in recursive notions lies in their application to systems rather to persons or simple projects. In such circumstances we detect a recursive nature when not only is the functionality of the mechanism is preserved, but also its moral integrity — in other words, when the protocols and the code are responsible for the preservation of the values that sustain the project, that is to say the community. What makes free software community vibrant isn’t the intention of producing for everyone, but of involving everyone in its construction. Here is the reason why the distribution of its efforts is granular; anyone can contribute with his or her knowledge and available time and effort.

The Commons that hackers are working towards isn’t guaranteed by free access, but by a willingness to not exclude any form of collaboration that improves the result. This is, obviously, not a product, but a way of understanding our relationship with technology and other humans based on the principle that the language used by machines for communication must be open and communities must be peer-based in order to dissolve the artificial, imaginary boundaries society imposes between nationals and aliens, experts and amateurs, communicating and sharing — and between free as in “open”, and free as in “free of charge”. As we’ve mentioned, we are speaking of cosmopolitan, informal communities based in the gift economy.

Just as the city is reinvented, the body is also involved in a process of reconfiguration. The accelerated expansion of chronic ailments — coupled with the growing number of persons with severe conduct, nutritional, mental or addictive disorders, along with numerous collectives of victims assailed by allergies or intolerances — marks incurable ills as a new and disquieting phenomenon within our world. We’ve been educated in the conviction that every ill has a technical, scientific, and therefore, political solution. We weren’t ready to confront the obvious and admit that not all bodies are equal and that all react in different ways to the same therapies. Generalized solutions always produce minorities of sufferers. Many people — it’s hard to know if they’re the most lucid or the most disheartened — seriously doubt whether institutionalized wisdom can offer adequate consolation. And there are answers for everything, from those who’ve fallen into the arms of disciplines as alternative as they are hazy, and from those who’ve opened the floor to talk about what’s going on with them (and us).

Putting the pieces back together is difficult and very costly. But Internet allows it at zero cost, as in the case of the mentally ill who communicate amongst themselves in Brain Talk Communities, or those affected by electro-hypersensitivity who don’t even possess the words to describe their ailment. Dissatisfied with available diagnostics and treatments, they take on the task of identifying traits that might be recognized as symptoms, compelling them to manufacture a shared and contrasted language. These projects constitute a gigantic real-time clinical study, where the affected themselves have decided to take the reins of their own bodies. There are none more interested in finding a good answer than those who are risking their own lives searching for it. They know that they can only aspire to enhancing their quality of life: for them at least, the healing paradigm has been left behind.

The experiment is proven when they agree that they feel better, even though this recovery, as with drug addicts, is etched in words. It is an effect of a commitment held between all, not an individual solution. If participants get taken seriously by formal scientific institutions, or experience an improvement, there is no other choice but to admit that we’re speaking of knowledge constructed by all. The community that sustains it is recognized — diagnosed, even — in light of the fact that the knowledge it produces is validated by virtue of being functional. The community both serves and is created by this cognitive activity. Let’s summarize its nature: experimental, open, relational, distributed, horizontal, collaborative, inalienable and recursive. As conversationalists, they are producing a relational body based on the experiential, in all that the academic laboratory qualifies as collateral, irrelevant or useless (Lafuente e Ibáñez-Martín s/d). It’s the same experience we’ve previously described when referring to urbanism. From abandoned lots, from social practices long ignored for belonging to the poor, ignorant or marginal, we are reinventing the city. In the same way, we are creating a common body from all that’s left, that which was discarded as irrelevant by formal scientists.

We now have all we need to reach a conclusion. The Commons science that has determined to achieve a reinvention of the body and the city is a knowledge enacted from the experiential, where, consequently, none can be excluded. Commons science is not an alternative to academic science. Both have a mutual need of each other, although we’ll occasionally see them contending public space, and ever more frequently, the publics.

]]>https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2016/02/11/science-as-public-good-and-commons-as-a-science/feed/06288GT’s bits proudly hosted at the Server of Trayectorias Libreshttps://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2015/10/21/gts-bits-proudly-hosted-at-the-server-of-trayectorias-libres/
https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2015/10/21/gts-bits-proudly-hosted-at-the-server-of-trayectorias-libres/#respondWed, 21 Oct 2015 17:03:16 +0000https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/?p=6244Our revamped website brought along another major change: our bits are since then hosted at the Servidor Libre de Trayectorias Tecnológicas, managed by Hacklab Cochabamba via Codigo Sur and with the support of Hivos.

We’re very grateful to have such wonderful people taking care of our bits and, in reciprocity, we’ve decided to translate their website text which you can find below:

Manifesto

We believe schools should not only transmit knowledge, skills and methods, but above all the spirit of good will, that is, the habit of helping others. – R. M. Stallman. Schools should be connected to reality, not confined to their four walls; they must be involved in improving society and its productive processes. We want to transform the present with our hands and ideas, to help create a better world. We want to create the future with our minds, our hands, our ideas. We want to propose ideas related to our closest reality. We read life, and everything around it, transforming it creatively as we please. We are more because we are together.

Why are we interested in introducing these values into education? Because it is the appropriate place to nurture them. Let’s stop blaming others for our troubles and get down to work! Ultimately, what we want is to keep thinking and acting as children… freely, without preconceptions, being curious and creative! And above all, stop thinking that what we do invades other people’s privacy! For us, offering, designing, creating, programming, and sharing information for the commons is very important. You can be a hacker too!

Hacker ‘Hood

A safe, free platform in which to organize ourselves, create, propose, schedule and above all work together as a group. Because we increasingly need more spaces to ensure that our information is not traded or used for purposes other than what we’ve decided when creating Barrio Hacker: a ‘hood for everyone who wants a community to meet with glocal friends with whom to propose alternatives to traditional platforms. It’s free, so you can visit all the ‘hoods in www.barriohacker.net. Trayectorias Tecno-Lógicas [Techno-Logical Trajectories] is one of the neighbourhoods where this idea arose; you can learn more about it in this video.

The Techno-Logical Trajectories Server is a shared commitment of several collectives and organizations that believe in the need to go towards greater technological sovereignty, and use their resources (both tangible and intangible) to support each while generating deeper sustainability and resilience.

Techno-Logical Trajectories Free Server

Working with information technology and communications is a basic need today. The functioning of these tools is mainly based on our data and the technology we use. Where is this data stored? What’s the aim of these technologies? What’s their purpose?… These are all issues we can’t overlook without expecting consequences. The Techno-Logical Trajectories Server is a shared commitment of several collectives and organizations that believe in the need to go towards greater technological sovereignty, and use their resources (both tangible and intangible) to support each while generating deeper sustainability and resilience. The Techno-Logical Trajectories server is managed by HackLab Cochabamba via Código Sur and with the support of Hivos.

What are we?

HackLab Cochabamba is a distributed, open, and collaborative space of hacker experimentation based in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The HackLab is not an institution but an assembly of wills. We are a non-physical space of co-creation, knowledge transfer, logic unwrapping, etc., all of which is built on the premise of SHARING.

What is a HackLab for us?

A HackLab is a place where we can create, experiment and share our knowledge freely.

What is a hacker?

A hacker is a passionate, creative individual who uses their knowledge to create something new or transform it, through experimentation and collaborative work. A hacker develops software, finds solutions, suggests social uses for technology, recycles old information into new material… Hey, maybe you’re a hacker and you just didn’t know it

Why a HackLab?

Because it’s important for us to meet, and get to know and acknowledge each other. And, in this way, build new realities through collective intelligence.

¿What do we do?

We are continuously suggesting and developing different projects. We work in a Techno-Logic way, which is the way wethink about the ways in which weoperate. All of this understood as a re-signification of the means, draw from a basic and central idea of relevance for our context.

Who are the members?

The HackLab is not a closed environment; it’s an assembly of wills for the creation of a hacker context in Cochabamba. You can sign up for our distribution list and talk about it together.

Where?

Wiki

A Wiki is a space to strengthen collective intelligence. Here at the HackLab we encourage you to consult the projects underway, contribute to the proposed documents, and create and produce new projects. Take a look at the Wiki of HackLab Cochabamba.

What is the function of a server?

A server is the “house”, the virtual accommodation where all the information that our organization wants to share with the world is stored and hosted. Also termed the “Cloud,” it’s actually just a computer somewhere in the world, and it’s called “server” because of its characteristics. All the texts, images, media, etc., that make up the organization’s web are stored in that computer. Writing the domain name in our browsers gives us access to the website, that is, to all the data stored in that specific computer.

Why is it important?

Barely a year ago, anyone who claimed that web data espionage from states and major corporations was not selective but indiscriminate, and that all our cloud data could be violated were treated as paranoid. That’s why it’s important that our websites be located in countries that respect liberties and that don’t easily tap our communications. There is no such a thing as an ideal place for this, but the USA, where most of the servers in the world are located, is not the best option to say the least.

Where is Código Sur located?

In CATNIX, an IXP or Internet Exchange Point in Barcelona, in partnership with Guifi.net, a global organization that works to achieve a free, open and neutral internet.

What are its techno-political advantages?

We work as hard as the powerful enemies of a free and open web who possess unbelievable amounts of resources. To compete with them is outside any logic. That’s why it’s so important to establish partnerships among the organizations working in the technology sector. Our association with Guifi has allowed us to offer organizations high-quality services at solidary prices, so they can choose safe and efficient alternatives without compromising their freedom and security.

Who manages the server?

Código Sur is a non-profit organization. For over 10 years, it has been supporting organizations and social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean with free technology. Código Sur has created its own CMS, called Cyclope 3, in Python/Django code. This tool was developed alongside the social organizations in order for them to have a web presence with a safe and simple CMS, and without having to learn web design or programming.

Who has joined Trajectories in this server so far?

HackLab Cochabamba is a distributed, open, and collaborative space of hacker experimentation based in Bolivia. The HackLab is not an institution but an assembly of wills. We are a non-physical space of co-creation, knowledge transfer, logic unwrapping, etc., all of which is built on the premise of SHARING.

Barrio de las Heroínas (Heroines ‘Hood) is an open space for discussion, dialogue, proposal and creation based in the Villa Coronilla neighbourhood in Cochabamba. A shared strategy between Plataforma Vecinal, O.T.B., Kuska, Jóvenes Sie7e, the Villa Coronilla Communications Collective, and the mediactivism platform with a gender perspective. A social and contextual use of the new technologies by and for the neighbourhood.

Facción is a platform based in Latin America that articulates independent networks of mediactivism through participative, horizontal and open processes. It aims to encourage free, open and shared communication towards a cultural and social transformation. We are activists, artists, broadcasters, bloggers, filmmakers, communicators, cultural agents, open technology developers, articulated members of the civil society, and social movements from over 15 different nationalities.

El Arte Resiste is a protest, resistance and ongoing-action platform from the Mexican citizens who work in art and culture. A platform that’s willing to collaborate with any contemporary Mexican collective and organization that speaks out for justice and against impunity.

ELLA (Latin American Women’s Gathering). Its main goal is to build experiences based on the diverse profiles of women from over 15 Ibero-American countries.

Let’s talk

If we want to create an open, collaborative discussion, a one-way relationship is out of the question. That’s why participative mailing lists are used, so that each individual can join freely and contribute, enquire, and check in with everyone else. That way, we’ll be able to strengthen a collective intelligence. We ask that you read about Netiquette so the conversation remains organic and understandable, based on collaborative and ongoing ethics and logics. So far, there are dozens of people on this list, whose goals are:

Sharing knowledge and activities related to Cochabamba Hacking

Developing joint projects and evaluating their relevance in the Cochabamba and Bolivian context

Meeting new people, collectives, institutions, etc., that believe in a social paradigm shift through hacker ethics

Supporting and being supported through the development and strengthening of the different Cochabamba free communities.

]]>https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2015/10/21/gts-bits-proudly-hosted-at-the-server-of-trayectorias-libres/feed/06244If Podemos Wonhttps://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2015/06/18/if-podemos-won/
https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2015/06/18/if-podemos-won/#commentsThu, 18 Jun 2015 08:11:08 +0000https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/?p=6229The rise of Podemos has provoked no shortage of stern omens in the international press, warning of hellish scenarios and dark times ahead were the breakout party to rise to office. One Spanish journalist has summarized those fears in four tidy paragraphs listing the legacy of the present establishment, reframed and handed back in cool satire.

The rise of Podemos has provoked no shortage of stern omens in the international press, warning of hellish scenarios and dark times ahead were the breakout party to rise to office. One Spanish journalist has summarized those fears in four tidy paragraphs listing the legacy of the present establishment, reframed and handed back in cool satire. We liked it so much, we chose to translate it for Guerrilla Translation.

If Podemos won the elections, according to doctor Miguel Carvajal of the University of Navarra, Spain would be left with 25% unemployment. Corruption would be so entrenched that its treasurer would be paying Monedero, Errejón and Pablo Iglesias 1under the table – not to mention remodeling their headquarters. According to Carvajal, if Podemos won the elections its ministers would end up working for the multinationals they favored with rigged bidding. They’d wind up as bankers swindling retirees, illiterates and the blind. And they’d conjure credit cards to spend dirty money on hookers and lingerie.

If Podemos won the elections, they’d spend millions from inflated budgets erecting useless buildings, train lines, highways and airports. Presidents of the autonomous regions would hit the lottery – a lot. They’d live in mansions, go sailing with drug traffickers, open Swiss bank accounts and have “trustees” burying hot-chocolate tins full of cash out in their gardens. According to Carvajal, if Podemos won the elections there would be more than 2,000 politicians convicted, their president would give his public speeches from a plasma TV screen, they’d take meetings with dictators accused of all kinds of crimes against humanity, and they’d sell arms to countries accused of human rights violations.

If Podemos won the elections we wouldn’t have one single university counted among the top hundred of the world, more than half the youth wouldn’t have work and would leave the country. Their economic management would be so dire that the national debt would grow until it surpasses GDP, just to keep on financing institutions as useless as the provincial councils, the advisory councils and the Senate. Taxes would completely suffocate would-be entrepreneurial leaders in the underground economy, and fiscal evasion would round off at a trillion euros.

If Podemos won the elections, judges would be handpicked by the political parties, and they’d have special courts, special retirements, expense accounts for lodging even though they have homes, no-one would ever pay for a flight, nor a mobile phone, nor a taxi, but could maintain several simultaneous public salaries along with private incomes, and no-one would monitor their absenteeism. If Podemos won the elections 2.5 million children would go hungry in low-income families living below the poverty line. Thousands of people would be evicted from their homes and take their own lives before living in the streets of the country with the highest number of vacant houses in Europe. You wouldn’t believe the terrible things that would happen if Podemos won the elections.

]]>https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2015/06/18/if-podemos-won/feed/16229My Debt to Spainhttps://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2015/06/03/my-debt-to-spain/
https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/2015/06/03/my-debt-to-spain/#respondWed, 03 Jun 2015 15:46:12 +0000https://www.guerrillatranslation.org/?p=6210"What does it mean to have €10K in fines? It's money that never existed, so it can't be claimed as missing from somewhere. If I pay, would it create wealth? Increase GDP? Socialize wealth, perhaps? Or only change hands? Whose hands are better?"

Pablo G. Prieto describes himself as “a scientist working on the science of a post-capitalist world”. He is also member of the Catalan Integral Cooperative and FairCoop. In this short piece, he expounds on his ongoing “relationship” with the Kingdom of Spain. As you’ll see, “it’s complicated”.

I received a thick envelope from the Agencia Tributaria del Reino de España – the “Tax Agency for the Kingdom of Spain”. Inside, there were pages and pages full of two-color charts, pretty nice. What they offered me – for free – was a thorough breakdown of all my outstanding fines since the 12th century, more or less.

That I got this letter isn’t news: they’ve been diligently sending me notices every six months, renewing the fines they impose on a regular basis so they don’t lapse and expire on me. These fines aren’t the kind for the bigshots; those expire in five years. But here’s the real news: for the first time, my debt had exceeded the figure of ten thousand antique euros (some 22 BTC, at time of writing). Strike up the band!

The Kingdom of Spain granted me, in a grand display of democracy, the freedom to chose from among three options:

a) All fines to be paid in full, plus an additional penalty (substantial) for having been in default for so long.

b) Deduction of the amount from my bank account, without my consent.

c) Use of this debt judgment to try and coerce me in any other context, at any given time in my life.

Two out of the three options are based on using violence and power. Fortunately, I don’t have a bank account, and I have less and less dependence on the State all the time. Looks like they’ve got no way to stick it to me, as my Argentine neighbor would say.

What does it mean to have €10K in fines? It’s money that never existed, so it can’t be claimed as missing from somewhere. If I paid, would it create wealth? Increase GDP? Socialize wealth, perhaps? Or only change hands? Whose hands are better?

And what if I don’t pay? Presently, I’m in a position to swear before a judge in court that I do not have this amount of money. Nor will I: whenever I get money, I immediately invest it in things which I’d like to see thrive. I’ve got nothing left. I only hope that, in the end, things do work out for me.

I enjoy a basic income from the cooperative I belong to, which also covers almost all my necessities. Money isn’t a problem for me. What’s more, I could come up with 10K pretty easily. But obviously, if this is what it’s for, well, no.

I don’t know if the State counts this socialization of private wealth as an asset, a liability, as debt, or whether it’s included in the general budgets. I’m not really clear to what extent they expect to receive it, and no idea why they want it. I’m unaware if they’re counting on it to end the crisis. I don’t know if on account of me, someone is going without a pension, a wheelchair or a school lunch. Maybe I am a fraud and should be punished.

What I do know is that if one day I say, alright, I’ll pay my debt, I won’t be able to pay the State directly. I’d have to give it to a private bank, which would use it as seed money to create new money – to benefit all kinds of evil projects along the way. Then the Bank will hand it over to the State, and they’ll return it to the Bank, by one of their many means of doing so.

The State and the Bank are practically the same thing! Stop, just stop. It’s better if I manage my own money.

So, what are those fines for? Well, they’re for disobeying unjust laws, laws I took no part in creating. For practicing democracy instead of requesting it. For doing my civic duty, which doesn’t come cheap.